


bodies full of untold stories

by paperiuni



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Accidental Soul Bond, Angst with a Happy Ending, Case Fic, Empathy, Intimacy, M/M, Magic, Magnus Bane's Strange Love Affair With Brooklyn, Porn with Feelings, Significant Breakfast, Switching, Telepathic Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-05-23 19:18:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 32,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14940303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: On a Thursday, Magnus misbrews a potion, and he and Alec are thrown closer together than either of them was ready for. On top of that, they're embroiled in a clandestine magical mystery that will take intellect, charm and unlikely partnership to solve. Luckily they have Isabelle—and, ultimately, each other.Or, the accidental soul bond casefic you never knew you wanted.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alistoney](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alistoney/gifts).



> Many thanks to jillyfae and alittlebriton for encouragement, enthusiasm, and straightening out my prose. ♥
> 
> As usual, we're in the Canon AU Where the Show Happens Over Months Instead of Weeks. Set in Season 3 Land before the serious plot hits the fan, i.e. between 3.01 and 3.02. This fic uses a couple of plot elements from 3.02 but doesn't consider the A-plot of the episode to have happened yet.
> 
> I promise there is a happy ending. I just like making characters work for it.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/) and twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen) If you want to do a read-along or shout on twitter, I'm delighted to be tagged.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magnus works to solve a magical conundrum, Alec works too hard, and things go boom. Gently.

It happened on an ordinary Thursday.

Magnus had been busy with his newest research topic: a potion formula from the heyday of al-Andalus, a moderate challenge in all this free time he had lately. The translation had gone swimmingly. The practical testing had hit a few snags. He'd produced a few clouds of iridescent fog, three of which had triggered the wards around the workroom. Passersby under his balcony might be treated to the sight of jewel-colored mist billowing into the sky, but he was no closer to a solution.

The swearing and sighing coming from the living room didn't precisely help his efforts. After a piteous text message from Alec regarding his day in the office, Magnus had invited him to come over, with the understanding that he, for his part, was working.

He needn't have worried. Alec brought his own paperwork, kissed Magnus on the cheek, and set up camp on the couch. The hangdog expression he wore supported his story of terrible Institute tomfoolery. He made coffee, which was a sweet gesture, but Magnus declined. The way his day was going, if he brought a cup of coffee into the workroom, it'd tip itself into his cauldron and an eldritch horror of some sort would rise from the brew.

If he hadn't made a promise to an old friend in Málaga, he'd have sent the parchment back across the Atlantic, by the foulest, mouthiest demonic courier he could summon. Let the local warlocks puzzle out their own unearthed relics. Let them find some other fool fluent in both Arabic of the right period _and_ medieval alchemical formulas.

He'd double-checked his ingredients. He'd braced the wards. The nearest leyline flowed freely and steadily, should he need to reach for it. By now, he was well practiced in the sequence in which the final ingredients had to be added, at the exact right temperature.

Magnus dropped the moonstone dust into the cauldron. It glittered on the surface, which turned from jet black to the blue of forget-me-nots, as it should.

Alec's phone trilled in the living room, and the potion shot out of the cauldron in a miniature geyser. The resulting mist jangled like a dropped basketful of bells as it welled through the workroom and speckled his cheeks with damp.

At least the wards activated before the fog could do more than boil the varnish off the doorjamb. Interesting reaction. He should jot it down. Numbly, Magnus snapped his fingers to open the balcony doors and stirred up a breeze to shepherd the inert mist out into the night. It spun away with a last mournful chiming.

Alec, at this point undaunted by any goings-on in the workroom short of actual explosions, was speaking in terse tones into the phone.

"Lilith's _tits_ ," Magnus said, with feeling, surveying the mess that filled both his worktables. The wards went quiet. That meant it was at least a safe mess to clean up.

"—Tell her to take her assigned number of rookies and go on patrol. That's the order. That's everybody's order. And if the Institute's not on _fire_ , don't call me again," Alec finished. Magnus twitched with irritation. Once upon a time he'd had a strict policy of not working with his lovers: as invigorating as he found a temper in a paramour, mixing romantic quarrels with professional debates just invited trouble.

It seemed working in the proximity of a lover carried similar hazards.

"God." Alec threw the phone into the couch cushions. "Can you believe—"

Magnus stopped in the doorway, the simmer of his displeasure becoming a churn. "I believe your no doubt _crucial_ patrol politics just destroyed two hours of meticulous effort!" Oh, and he was still wearing the unflattering lab gloves. He yanked his fingers free one by one. "This formula is twelve centuries old. That's eight more than me. I know you don't understand this, but could you have a little respect for the fact that I'm trying to?"

"I didn't—" Alec's throat flushed. "You've been fighting that piece of paper all week, and now it's my fault you're getting freaky magical backwash?"

"That _piece of paper_ is, one, vellum, and two, evidence of a warlock tradition that's been lost for five hundred years." Magnus let the gloves slap down onto the floor. "When I told you I didn't mind you working here, I expected a modicum of quiet."

"You know I can't shut down that phone." Alec gave a harangued huff. "'Cause the second I do, somebody will get ideas and I'll be back to smoking ruins."

"Your ranks of perfect soldiers? Being a bit unruly? Who'd have guessed." Magnus went past Alec to the bar cart at his best affronted strut.

"Don't. Just—not right now." Alec spoke to his back, but Magnus heard the fine cracks running through his self-control.

Alec also knew very well Magnus had been working on the potion for days. Indignation smothered patience.

He spun a fingertip over the tops of the bottles. Between one turn and the next, he beckoned his rings back onto his fingers. Shields and masks, smoke and mirrors. "Surely there's some letter of the Law you can bring down on their heads."

The fractures met in the middle.

"No, there's fucking not!" Alec burst out. "There's just me and a job I can't fail at, because if I do, it's not gonna be only me, it'll be my family and the cabinet and whatever stupid little good we've done! Beauchamp knows she's toeing the line, but what the hell can I do, when she's one of like four reliable patrol leaders I have—"

The glasses chattered in the cart. Drawing his magic back into himself, Magnus reined in the ambient outburst. His vexation was blooming into outright ire. He'd poured hours into his efforts. Turned down invitations. Stared at archaic lexicons until his eyes watered. All that, undone by Alec's inability to keep his little troop of angelic troublemakers in line. "Maybe you should be over there tending to your wayward charges. And I should be here, finishing this highly complex research, in silence."

"So next time you say I can come over, I'll just take that as a no? I wasn't exactly picturing spending half the evening dodging weird fumes that eat through paint!"

"What _were_ you picturing?" Magnus was setting a trap. He wanted solitude, and a damned drink. "This is what I do, Alexander. Sometimes the interests of one's people lead one elbow-deep into volatile alchemical mixtures."

"I know." Alec's words clotted together. "I'm not trying to sabotage you! I just wanted—"

Magnus loaded his voice with arid ennui. "Calling it sabotage would be flattering your capacity for subterfuge, yes."

Alec stopped. His next inhalation shuddered, and then he mustered himself. He did have an admirable knack for that.

"What, so I'm just a bother to you now? If you don't want me here, just fucking say so! You don't have to take pity on me."

Magnus, admittedly, winced. Behind Alec, the couch was covered in paperwork, reports on the odious Institute letterhead and a smattering of pens and crumpled notes. The smell of the coffee Alec had made lingered in the air. Magnus looked tactically past his tall frame, his taut shoulders and clenched jaw, there in the middle of the living room.

Alec snatched up his messenger bag and began stacking his papers into an orderly pile. Quite without engaging his brain, Magnus's hands unscrewed a cork and poured a measure of whiskey. Something peaty and warm, as if a chill had crept into his bones. The silence twitched like a living thing.

Then his phone rang in the bedroom, two seconds before Alec's lit up with a red rune, signaling a high-priority Institute message.

" _Shit_." Alec spared the screen a single look and then strode to the coat rack without a backward glance.

Magnus answered the call. At the other end was Jessamine Reed, a charming if high-strung warlock from Williamsburg, who rambled swiftly through a story about a group of bedazzled mundanes under an enchantment she couldn't recognize. She was near a subway station. She'd run into Shadowhunters there.

After a check of his mental map of the city and a note on the direction of the wind, Magnus found himself with an unhappy hunch. It would've pleased him infinitely to discount it and stay in with a book _not_ written in archaic Arabic and the bottle of Connemara. Particularly the latter.

He wouldn't be able to quiet the suspicion beating against his skull. Not unless he made sure.

He snapped on a coat and a scarf, opened a portal barely ten inches from Alec's nose as he was about to head out the door, and said briskly, "Myrtle Avenue station. Let's go."

* * *

Alec said nothing as they emerged at Myrtle Avenue. His arms swung at his sides in time with his steps. He always took Magnus's hand or put a hand on his back when they took a portal, even when positive of the destination; not this time. The wind had picked up. It groaned hollowly in the structures of the old elevated rail track running above the street.

"This way." A cant of Alec's head indicated their course, a couple of blocks away from the station along slippery sidewalks. Winter was marshaling at last, throwing down prickly gusts of sleet.

Somewhat to Magnus's relief, the Shadowhunters they met on a disused lot overrun with brown grass had Clary among them. She was the one speaking to Jessamine, whose head of copious auburn curls gave her away even as a wary silhouette.

"Report, Roseworth," Alec said curtly to the leader of the patrol. The man leaped into a more cohesive story than Magnus had had from his own colleague.

Since the afternoon, Institute patrols had run into a handful of people, all of them ordinary mortals, glowing like beacons to their Sight and behaving strangely. Two sisters, Brooklyn-born, not versed in dead languages—Clary came over to offer the tidbit—had begun to speak to one another in what seemed to be fluent Akkadian. A grandmother and grandson had visited Cypress Hills Cemetery and raced each other home, quite a feat given the elderly gentlewoman's general health.

Then there were the four friends, on their way home from a bar, who'd sat down on a bench by the empty lot and were sleeping on each other's shoulders, smiling blissfully. First they'd drawn Jessamine's attention, then that of Roseworth's patrol. While the man talked, Magnus furtively gave Jessamine his best _I have this under control_ smile.

If he was honest, it gratified him, not in an entirely benign way, that she'd called him instead of his successor. Lorenzo Rey had the title, but clearly he had some work left in winning the faith of his fellows.

"Have you got the locations of these events?" He pointed the question at Roseworth, who glanced at Alec.

Alec nodded, a dash of impatience in the gesture. "Magnus is here to help. Let him."

"Fairchild," Roseworth said, "show Warlock Bane the map."

It was some manner of odd to see Clary straighten at the order. She took out her phone. Alec leaned in over her left shoulder, keeping her between himself and Magnus, and she brought up a map with red runes pinned across Brooklyn. The locations ran from Brooklyn Heights and east to Bushwick and Glendale, fanning out in a damning pattern.

Magnus stepped over to Jessamine, re-checked that it was her opinion that the sleeping people on the bench were under some warlock enchantment, and then spent a minute reassuring her. He'd talk to the Shadowhunters. It was their concern now, too, since mundanes were involved, but the Head of the Institute was here. She knew Magnus would vouch for him personally.

She knew, since she didn't live under a rock, just buried in books most of the time, that Magnus loved the Head of the Institute. That didn't seem relevant to mention right now.

She kept nodding through his spiel. He'd have squeezed her hand if he didn't worry she might not let go. She was prone to nerves around Shadowhunters.

"No demon sightings in the area?" Alec was asking.

"None related, sir," said Roseworth. "Whatever that—effect is, it doesn't seem to interest them." The other two of his patrol stood to the side, dark-clad and dour-looking in the extreme. Biscuit had drawn the short straw on patrol company tonight, Magnus guessed.

He ducked back into the discussion. "Have you been following up on these cases? There are more than three on the map."

"Yeah," Clary said. "Let me see what we've got." She shut off the map, made eye contact with Magnus, and tapped her right cheek covertly. _Something on your face_ , she mouthed.

If Magnus in fact stood in the middle of a professional discussion with a bunch of Shadowhunters with potion ingredients on his face, he was going to banish the lot and all its occupants to the bottom of the Hudson. He scraped a knuckle along his jaw. A colorless, powdery residue caught the streetlight in a glimmer. Some of the last brewing attempt had dried on him.

Wonderful. As if the whole situation wasn't already four varieties of horrible.

"I want every report that so much as scratches this topic on my desk tonight," Alec said to Roseworth, on Clary's left. "Put together an extra patrol for these areas. It doesn't look like an immediate threat, but we need more information. How far it's spread, who else has been affected, if it's ongoing. If we need to contact the High Warlock, I'll do that."

Magnus felt a jab under his heart. _How dare you. How dare you look out for me, when I'm angry at you._

He squared his shoulders.

"A word?" He didn't need to address Alec; Alec broke from the others and they went a strategic twenty strides down the sidewalk. Even steering his Shadowhunters, he had that underlying attunement to Magnus. It was inconvenient. Both because of his still-stewing anger and because of what he needed to say.

"It doesn't seem dangerous." Alec lowered his voice. He stood a little farther away than usual. "If we can get a warlock or two to help us, we should be able to run any damage control we need for the affected mundanes. Countercharms, that sort of thing? Soon as we find out what's causing it."

This was, Magnus reminded himself, the cost of involving himself. He could've refused Sílvia when she asked for his help with the manuscript, but no, he'd agreed for nothing more than her delightful laughter and the two bottles of Valencian red they'd drunk, old vintages from her ancestral vinyard—an islet of impeccable quality in a region filled with forgettable wines.

He could've not jumped at the chance to relive his days as the watcher of this borough. He could've considered his workroom wards were not built to cover every age-old arcane secret.

He looked up at Alec, whose frown was sliding from deep thought to the first hints of anxiety. Shaking his shoulders to coax out the knot tightening at the top of his spine, Magnus said, "I know what's causing it. This is my doing. Not on purpose, of course."

"What?" That jostled Alec out of his martial posture. "Oh. The—the stuff you were working on."

"Alexander." _Fires under earth. The circles of Hell. Well, fuck._ His repertoire didn't include a suitably strong expletive. "I took precautions, like any sensible warlock. My wards should have caught these effects. I thought—"

"Look. I'm—we're gonna handle this." Alec had taken half a step without Magnus's notice; he reached out a hand. Magnus flinched before he could push back the reaction, and Alec's fingers glanced against his hand.

There was a gentle impact to the air around the contact point, a sudden bloom of warmth across his skin like he'd plunged his hand into fresh bathwater. His heart leaped, surprise speeding his pulse.

It was Alec. It was only Alec. Alec under his stern Shadowhunter facade, teetering between worry and duty—

Not his professional duty. It was a softer resolution, one he was trying to keep under wraps here, because there were less than friendly eyes on him, but his thoughts curled around it like a touchstone. Something to both keep safe and draw strength from.

Something. Someone. Inexplicable irritation tugged at Magnus. He felt Alec start back. "Sorry. Uh, what just happened?"

Confusion bled into Magnus's annoyance like ink into water. Alec's confusion, edged now in unhappy caution.

Magnus hadn't gained a reputation far in excess of those of warlocks centuries his senior _entirely_ by his talent for flexing the truth. He had put in the work, too.

He pressed a thumbnail hard into the meat of his own palm, and Alec's abrupt, faint "Ow!" gave him the decisive proof.

"You feel what I feel. And vice versa." He forced himself to look up at Alec, who looked back with uncanny synchronicity. He couldn't tell whose shock made his mouth dry. "Physically _and_ mentally, it seems."

"Well, fuck," said Alec.

For a sweet, imprudent second, Magnus pictured kicking him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magnus Bane vs. His Own Emotions, round one. The mystery potion is investigated further.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks and blessings to [Taupe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taupefox59/) for keen-eyed beta and much-needed encouragement!
> 
> A thousand thanks to everyone who waited patiently as my summer workload ran roughshod over this story. <3 Now it's autumn and I can write again!

"Not to be a busybody," Isabelle said from behind Magnus, "but you're staring. People are starting to notice."

"Ah." He turned to her. "It's hardly a revelation for anyone with eyes that he's rather strapping."

"I'm not judging. He's your boyfriend to ogle." She smacked an overstuffed manila folder onto the mission table. "Here's everything I found in hard copy under _magical effects, synergistic_ and _connections, psychic and somatic._ I've got some more stuff on the tablet." The device hit the table a tad more gently.

Alec stood on the raised walkway across the ops center, conferring with an austere-looking Shadowhunter of about forty. Her bearing reminded Magnus of Lydia Branwell, but without Lydia's dry warmth along her keen edges. She was inevitably a side note in Magnus's scrutiny.

For the last three hours, there'd been a flexing coil of connection running from him to Alec and back again. Paradoxically it seemed to wind itself tightest when they were near each other, and loosen when the distance grew. It was, however, constant. Magnus had started back from the contact that'd triggered it and not touched Alec since. That did nothing to bar the ceaseless flow of information: Alec was tired, bracing his professional front to hold. His physical discomforts mixed into Magnus's own, a background hum to the sharper point of his control. He was decidedly irritated by the woman he was talking to.

"Are you still with me?" Oh yes, Isabelle, database sorceress and tireless sleuth for illicit knowledge, delivering it into Magnus's grasping hands from the troves of the Institute.

Alec had told her everything in the first five minutes after they portaled in from Brooklyn. Magnus wanted to blame him, but couldn't. If anyone had to know the whole sordid truth, she was pretty high on his list, too.

"I beg your pardon." He leafed through the pages she'd photocopied. Mostly they looked sadly encyclopaedic, but some of the bibliographies might bear further investigation. "May I take these?"

She waved a permissive hand. "Our section on warlock magic isn't what it could be. You said it was an Arabic tradition, early medieval?"

"The manuscript is Arabic, from the al-Andalus. The tradition remains something of a mystery." He gave her the details he'd originally had from Sílvia, and a summary of those he'd gleaned himself.

"As it happens, I have a friend in Alicante who might be able to help."

"A Shadowhunter?"

"Obviously." She looked a touch apologetic. "If it helps, he got along famously with the warlocks in the Academy when they were still allowed in Idris, before Consul Dieudonné. He taught me Greek and Latin, and some Arabic."

"You're talking about Professor Khouri." Magnus weighed this. He didn't know the man, but Ragnor had complained about him on occasion. Ragnor had complained about a great many things and people, but particularly those he gave a damn about.

Concern from Alec's direction told Magnus he'd let the bittersweet thought range too wide. How was he meant to do anything without it leaking to Alec? Now his annoyance was surely resounding. They were not a single unit of thought, but rather two clunking parts of the same system, jittering in disharmony.

"I don't need to give him all the details." Izzy flashed a smile. "Divide and conquer, right?"

"I don't think that's a proper use of that aphorism." He let her roll her eyes at him, both of them indulging the other. "I'd appreciate your friend's insight. Mine is—a little compromised right now."

"You're not the only one." She looked across ops to where Magnus's eye kept straying. Her glance at her brother was a calculating sort. Then Alec moved, the severe Shadowhunter at his heels, and vanished into the corridor leading to his office. Something bubbled against Magnus's awareness, an emotion at a fine, incoming boil.

"I'm gonna send that message," Izzy said. "I should hear back by morning, but it's about five a.m. in Idris."

"That's quite all right." Magnus tried to ignore the ill temper Alec kept lidded. "I should, ah. I did leave something of a mess back home."

Her hand on his forearm startled him, a casual touch that made him realize the tension in his muscles. "Let Alec handle it. I'll call you the minute I have something. Promise."

"I'm much obliged, my dear."

The clip of her heels rounded a computer terminal and faded away. Magnus went after Alec.

* * *

The door to Alec's office had stuck, like it sometimes would, a finger's width before closing.

"Sir," said a woman's voice, modulated to stinting respect. "This is an unidentified magical effect. We have multiple mundane victims. At this point, involving the High Warlock isn't jumping the gun. It's your duty."

"Like it's your duty to lay off your kill count with Ramachandra and actually take the people I assign to you when you go on patrol?" Alec's voice, in turn, was rigid with control. Not that Magnus needed the auditory cue. Now he knew who the female Shadowhunter was: Chloé Beauchamp, veteran soldier with a boastful streak and latest thorn in Alec's side. She seemed to have few qualms about yanking on the chain of command.

"Letting the rookies fend for themselves a bit builds character. Didn't you and your sister clear out a Kuri nest by yourselves when she was thirteen?"

"You think that's a good principle?" Neither did Magnus need this case of near telepathy to know Alec was at the end of his patience. "I am _not_ my parents, Chloé. Every death in the line of duty makes us weaker. Can we at least examine that idea?"

Before Magnus could process this part, Beauchamp turned toward the door. "I can't believe I'm saying this to Maryse Lightwood's son, but if you don't alert Rey, I will. We need to know what's going on. We need to do our job. Sir."

Alec said something too low for Magnus to hear, but he sensed the bitterness it roused in him. Then Beauchamp exited, and Magnus beat a retreat to the archive room next door.

That'd nearly been as awkward as it'd been enlightening. Magnus would consider this illumination later. It'd be best to follow Isabelle's counsel and leave Alec to his work. He wanted to go home and see if enough alcohol would dull the live feed of Alec's emotions to his brain. _That_ would probably also wreak havoc on Alec's clarity of thought.

He knocked, and went in at Alec's muffled, "It's open!"

Alec's face fell in a halting way as Magnus entered. "Hey. Izzy get you what you need?"

"She gave it her best shot." Magnus fished up a smile, then wondered why he bothered. Alec could tell he didn't feel it.

"I'm putting together a surveillance team for the case. It'll stretch us a little thin, but demon alerts have been at a low this week." Alec's eyes flickered across his laptop screen. "Jessamine Reed—she hasn't worked with the Institute before, but she's already involved. You think we can trust her?"

"To not go tattling to dear Lorenzo? Or are you looking to commission her?"

"Both?" Alec frowned. "I mean, if you think you need help figuring out how to fix this. I know you have Catarina."

"I don't believe Jessamine's eager to run to Lorenzo. She'd have done it already."

Alec acknowledged that with a nod to the laptop.

"I'll keep her in mind if Cat and I find ourselves foiled," Magnus said when the silence began to thicken. "Speaking of which, if you could drop by tomorrow? You make up half of my most accessible specimen, as it were."

"Right. Sure. Around noon?"

It was Magnus's turn to nod in inane confirmation.

"If there's anything else you figure the Institute's resources can help with, just let me know." Alec deigned to raise his head, the late hour evident in his slightly hollow look. "I'll see you tomorrow." He started to rise, but Magnus interrupted him with a gesture.

He did not want Alec any closer. It was an uncharitable, ugly thought, and he could barely keep it contained. "I'll see myself out. I know the way by now."

He stepped out and thereby escaped whatever look his parting words had left on Alec's face; the tug of dismay under his heart bypassed such barriers. The door fell heavily shut behind him.

Once he was home, he'd drink himself to some bearable depth of oblivion, Alec's ability to think be damned.

* * *

Next morning, even after three cups of coffee and a vile but effective shot of clearhead potion, things had not improved. Magnus dawdled too long in the bathtub, forlornly roomy without Alec and his long limbs and warm hands, his mouth teasing the back of Magnus's neck—and oh, oh no.

He was not going there. The distance helped, but Magnus could still tell Alec was, one, sleep-deprived, two, on edge, and three, possibly hungry. There was a vague gnawing sensation he couldn't place. Cat would be by soon, and Alec not long after her. Magnus needed to amass at least some patience, tact and composure by then. The research notes that were his best clue to exactly what he'd _done_ yesterday were in hideous disorder.

He got out of the tub. Got dressed. Cleaned his workroom from the point where he'd left it last night once he'd got too drunk to aim magic anymore. All the while, he ran potion formulas and nursery rhymes and ribald drinking songs through his head to deaden himself to the connection to Alec.

Catarina turned up fifteen minutes after Magnus had bent his head to Izzy's materials. He'd briefed her via an inebriated phone call last night, and she'd only laughed at him for two minutes. That he had deserved, for not double-checking his own word choices.

"Hoisted by your own petard." She skimmed his lab notes with all the presumption three centuries of friendship afforded to her. "Sílvia got you good this time. If you weren't so hopelessly besotted right now, I'd be pointing out your general weakness to South European types."

"Please, Cat." Magnus rolled his eyes. "She's an attractive woman, but our chemistry has always been limited to the cerebral kind."

"Mm-hm. You say here that the potion 'enhances expertise'. How are four synchronously sleeping college students better at what they do?"

"Well, I portaled them off to their apartment. The Institute has people observing them. Alexander should have an update, when he—"

A raw, harsh feeling fluxed into him, misery like a breath against chill glass that spread and faded. Magnus braced himself on the nearest worktable. Not his emotion.

Alec was close now, apprehensive but resolute. Not unlike Magnus himself.

Alec knocked before he let himself in, hung up his coat and weapons, and nodded a greeting to Catarina. By then Magnus had wrapped himself in quaking self-discipline. He made himself focus on the facts, such as they were.

No great revelations had manifested overnight on the side of the Institute. Alec laid out the details with martial stoicism. None of them were conclusive, though the effects didn't seem to distress the victims.

"The best next step would be to get warlock eyes on them," Alec said to round off his report. "Runes aren't enough for this. They just tell you you're looking at a warlock kind of magic."

"That would also mean involving more people," Magnus said, carefully neutral.

Alec nodded, clearly grasping the subtext—Magnus would rather labor alone day and night than let the wrong person anywhere near this charade. _Stop knowing what I need._ The thought burned bitter in his mind. _I don't need you to fight my battles for me._ Such as they were.

"I have one question," Catarina cut in, gesturing with the sheaf of Magnus's papers. "These victims sound very calm about their circumstances. Usually mortals _notice_ when you get magic on them. Is that on purpose? Part of the potion?"

"I didn't think about that." What else had Magnus not thought about, even when he'd had all night to do it? "The formula includes nightwort, and a little-known use of nightwort is—"

"To control the responsivity of a potion's effect. Especially when combined with ground basilisk scale. What kind did you use?"

He stared at the four jars of said ingredient on his shelf, set in a perfect row, and tried to remember which one he'd chosen yesterday. Alec lingered in the doorway, hands behind his back, shunted from the conversation. The contrast to his usual mixture of curiosity and care toward Magnus's workroom was stark: he'd circle and wander, not disturbing anything, making faces at the more bizarre labels or knick-knacks. Magnus had always thought it disarming, the same way as Alec's utter sincerity could be.

"You can help me retrace my steps later," he said to Catarina. "We shouldn't keep Alexander, and there are some morsels to be gleaned from the two of us."

"Of course." She hid her dry amusement, well enough that Alec didn't spot it, but Magnus knew that twitch of her eyebrows.

Alec stepped forward. "What do you need me to do?"

A smell rose through the room like an invisible hand had been whittling juniper, fragrant shavings falling everywhere. Catarina held a hand out to Alec, redolent with magic. "It's a basic analysis spell, but using it on yourself is always tricky, so I'll be stepping in for Magnus. It'll tell me more about how the enchantment works on you both."

He took her hand like clasping a weapon hilt. Light, firm, ready to flex into the impact of a blow landing. Magnus watched the movement, mesmerized, until Catarina nudged him. "Hand, please."

Muttering a half-apology, he laid his hand into hers. It was not her part in this that made his stomach tighten with unease.

"Now," she said, mostly to Alec, "I need you both to focus on the connection. At your leisure, gentlemen."

Alec's mouth curled, an infinitesimal drop in tension. Magnus closed his eyes before he could stare again. As long as his mind engaged a problem, it was a little easier to ignore Alec, to make a breakwater against the surge and ebb of the connection.

He had to put an end to this intrusion. He needed his peace and privacy back. In the face of that, on the scale of unpleasant things he'd done in his time, dropping his guard for Alec shouldn't even have _registered._

He reached for Alec. It felt like drawing the first breath after being choked, the air sweet and raw, the pressure of his own denial gone.

The elation lasted for a second, a slow blink where he only knew the tension lifting, the pure physical relief, before something sour and murky ran into the clean flow of the link. Magnus flinched but didn't pull back. Catarina's magic worked on the periphery of his awareness, but the rest was Alec: restraint, oppressive in its force, wound muscles and counted breaths. A wall around his self, without gate or crack.

It shouldn't have been possible to shut down the bond. The best Magnus could do was fill it with mental noise. And Alec wasn't warding Magnus off, but rather warding himself _within_ the bond. Stray emotions skimmed against Magnus like drops of driving rain on a car window.

"Magnus," Catarina warned. "Focus."

As if _he_ were the problem? As if Alec wasn't casually managing what Magnus had tried in vain all night? A waste of good whiskey, that had been.

Hurt sliced from Alec to him and then back, dragged in sharply. Magnus stomped on both the remorse and the vexation that followed. He'd borne worse. He'd done worse. The whole predicament was ridiculous, all things considered. Catarina would finish her analysis, and he'd avoid Alec until they found a countermeasure, and once it was over—

He'd think about that then. When he was alone in his head.

Catarina released his hand. It took all Magnus had to look at them, his oldest friend, her brows pinched in appraisal, and then his boyfriend, who stared out into the living room, his posture set as if he were marble instead of flesh.

"I have it." Catarina's upturned hands looked empty, but a pattern of magic wisped and whirled between them, a restless cat's cradle, ready to be studied.

"Is that it?" Alec asked, bland and level. "Everything you need from me?"

"Yes," she said before Magnus could react. "Thank you. We'll let you know when we have concrete results."

"Call me or Izzy any time." Again, a fractional smile touched Alec's mouth. Magnus felt his own throat work once. Then, without so much as a glance at Magnus, Alec went to get his coat.

* * *

It was Isabelle that Magnus contacted first, a day and a night later. He'd slept about five hours of those twenty-four, going over his initial brewing attempts, first with Catarina and then on his own, swearing bitterly that he'd never again let himself work with an unfamiliar formula and trust _any_ detail to memory alone.

Catarina had deposited her spell into a holding stone, a receptacle for sustaining a magical effect. He'd pulled up the pattern of the potion a dozen times, twisted and turned and pored over it until his eyes ached. It was an elegantly made charm, its hues distinct and its structure efficient. He should've felt some professional satisfaction.

The choppy emotions stemming from Alec rather forestalled any sense of success. That, and the one glaring lack in his data: he had no control specimens for the pattern Catarina had extracted.

So he texted Isabelle, got a Flatbush address from her, and did a spot of espionage at the apartment shared by the sisters endowed with sudden linguistic expertise. The work enclosed him in a thin bubble of serenity. There, he had his books and his tools and his intellect, and what he did not know he could uncover, analyze, piece together until it was neat and seamless and held.

Outside was the shift and tangle of his relationship. When he reached a solution, he sat with the purging charm for the twelve hours it needed to simmer and then cool and solidify under strict watch. Afterwards, with prosaic resolution, he knocked himself out with a dreaming draught and slept, deep and unbroken, until the next afternoon.

His previous exchange with Izzy had been breezily courteous. He hesitated a minute before making the call.

"How would you feel about some breaking and entering for a good cause?" he said, first thing, when she picked up.

"In Flatbush again? I can be there at ten."

He adjusted her suggestion to twelve p.m. on account of favorable magical influence and also to ease the planned home intrusion, and that was it.

That perhaps made her his current favorite Lightwood. She knew how to separate business from sentiment, especially the sticky, chaotic kind that'd get everywhere once you so much as dabbed your finger in it. In his short roster of allies for this job, she outshone every other candidate.

Six minutes past midnight, as Sunday yielded to Monday, they met in the lee of a tiny park. The cold had burnished the stars overhead to rare brightness. Magnus handed Izzy one of the glamoured censers he'd prepared, the purging charm packed in the incense bricks.

"Sorry I'm late. I had to sneak a bit, getting out." She tucked the censer into the messenger bag on her shoulder.

He made a noise that blended surprise and sympathy. "If you don't have free run of the Institute grounds, whoever does, my dear?"

"The funny thing about positions of authority: they put more eyes on you, not less. It's not so easy to leave on the sly as it used to be. You don't want to know what Cecily Coldwell got on her seraph blade and needed me to get off it today, or how long it took."

"Entirely true. I don't."

They started walking. Magnus scanned the street, the alleys swallowed by shadows, the handful of people still about. Her point about stealth landed squarely. If the purging charm worked as he hoped, he could repeat the process for the other afflicted people, and the High Warlock would never be the wiser about this mishap.

"Just so I have this straight," Izzy said. "We go in, place the censers, wait for your magic smoke to negate the _other_ magic smoke that started this, and we're home free?"

"In layman's terms." Magnus rolled his shoulders under his coat. "This isn't a specific countermeasure. It purges any magic in the area, which serves our ends now. The original charm is... fluid. The effect is constant, but it reacts to certain needs."

"Needs?" Her brow arched.

"Not the most accurate word. The potion is applied to two or more people, and it links them together." He crooked his forefingers together to demonstrate. "It lets them share each other's resources. The problem is that the author of the formula is, as is the wont of writers in the period, delicate about the precise purpose."

Such as the fact that it might create a literal psychosomatic connection. Magnus tried to keep his mind busy so no idle part of it could start sieving through his state of being. At best, Alec's presence blurred into his own: a tightness in his shoulder or a dryness in his throat might come from either of them, and milder emotions rustled against him but didn't linger.

"So Mrs. Huang and her grandson..." Fascination, and a smidge of devilment, twinkled in Izzy's eyes. "He wanted her to run with her, so she could. That's adorable."

"Alas, that the surprise case of speaking in tongues in the young Misses Lindberg is less so." The sisters lived in a rented upper-floor apartment, which was why he'd brought a Shadowhunter along. One rune would see Isabelle to the balcony, another would get her in through the door, without the incriminating vestiges warlock spells tended to leave.

"It does slightly blow my mind you did all this with one potion," she said. "Runes are simple. They do the one thing they're designed for."

"I did all this with _variants_ of one potion." He winced inwardly to admit, "I still don't know what exact factor locks down the effect in each case. I don't suppose you've heard from the good professor?"

"He's looking into it. I should have something for you soon. The sooner we clean this up, the better."

"I'm quite aware," Magnus said, under his breath. "Here we are."

The limestone row house had settled for the night. A string of fairy lights snaked around the third-floor French balcony like luminous ivy; Izzy glanced up from her phone as he pointed it out to her.

"Just making sure we don't have demon alerts in the area." She shut off the screen. "I'm gonna go round the block, if you can—"

"Check for magical influence. Yes."

He thanked his stars for her as she took off. Her sangfroid and cool curiosity were a blessing. He'd half expected to be pressed on the subject of Alec, but she hadn't even hinted at her brother. A scholar and a gentlewoman, she was.

Dim amusement rippled into his thoughts. He barely stopped himself from smiling in reaction.

Powers below, he could _not_ think about Alec. Reaching out, not with a spell but his senses, the affinity every warlock had for the magical energies of the world, he swept the area. To the west he felt the drowsy pulse of the nearby leyline. All was quiet, though the midnight air nestled eagerly into his cupped hands, the witching hour beckoning to him.

This was the best part, he thought to himself: the mystery, the invention, the benign skullduggery. He'd almost missed such problems, ones that were small enough to solve. Uninvited psychic links aside, he could grow to enjoy this sort of warlockry again.

A portal opened along the sidewalk.

The ripple it made struck him like a slap to the face. Something clattered inside the building, but Magnus had no attention to spare. His blood had gone to ice.

Looking far too dapper for either the time of night or Magnus's liking, Lorenzo Rey stepped from the portal.

"Magnus, old rascal," he said. "Fancy meeting you here."


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fourth rule of shadowhunting: never go out alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Taupe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taupefox59/) kicked this into posting shape again, and I'm deeply grateful ♥

The new High Warlock of Brooklyn emerged on the unremarkable residential street, and Magnus knew a second of blind panic. His planning had rather hinged on Lorenzo not taking notice until he could both rectify his mistake and destroy the evidence.

Then he recalled he'd been caught in more compromising situations by more illustrious figures—such as _in flagrante delicto_ by the Doge of Venice, once upon a time—and marshaled himself.

"Hello, Lorenzo. Finally getting familiar with the city?" He took a judicious step away from the building. The effect of the potion was subtle, but if he let Lorenzo dwell on the ambient energies around them, he'd recognize Magnus's handiwork.

"Not to worry." Lorenzo could hardly have condescended more if he'd patted Magnus on the head. "I'm aware of what it takes to serve as the High Warlock. I've put in the legwork. The city is in good hands. Though I did notice the Prospect Park leyline feels a little anemic to the touch."

"It just needs a little time to recover after the recent excitement, no doubt." Magnus measured the moment. _Just so I'm clear: I mean that time our people toiled to stop a mass murderer from leaving the city. Not that you'd remember, you preening serpent. You weren't there._

A part of Magnus wanted to spit that in Lorenzo's face. But their people also had, in that aftermath, dismissed him from the position of trust he'd held for decades.

"In fact, I was on my way to a nearby leyline nexus—"

"Lookout Hill," Magnus couldn't resist supplying. As if he hadn't worked a ritual or a dozen at the spot. "You're taking a pragmatic tack to the work."

"Yes," said Lorenzo, unperturbed. He resisted Magnus's attempt to steer him further away from the damning shimmer of magic. "As dear _maestra_ Nieves always liked to say, hands-on is the only way to be certain."

"Wise words from a wise woman." Magnus swallowed his rancor. There was more at stake than bandying veiled insults with his least favorite colleague. Superior. Authority was relative, anyway.

"There I was, ready to plunge into the mystery of the leyline, when I received a fire message from a _fascinating_ sender."

Lorenzo would hold the dramatic pause until he was prompted, so Magnus made a "Mm-hm?" sound.

"From a Shadowhunter. Which I wouldn't normally put much stock in, but this one had quite a tale to tell."

"And does your tale have a point?" He was calm. Once upon a time, not wearing a stitch, he'd erased a careful minute from the memory of the Doge of the Most Serene Republic with a most definitely forbidden spell. In comparison, this was a walk in the park.

"My point, Warlock Bane, is that there's a rash of unchecked magic spreading across Brooklyn right under my nose, and the Head of the Institute hasn't breathed a word about it to me. I don't need to guess twice as to why."

Magnus did his utmost to affect polite curiosity. With Lorenzo two steps away, there was no spell Magnus could cast without alerting him. "That sounds like a matter you should take up with the Head of the Institute, my friend."

"I could, if I had an iota of faith in Alec Lightwood's competence _or_ integrity in any matter that involves you."

"Now, now, there's no need for slander. Whatever makes you think I had anything to do with—what exactly was the issue? Shadowhunters do tend to get overly serious about things going bump in the night that aren't _them._ "

Mind-influencing magic, even the gentlest forms of speaking mind to mind, was rarely taught and strictly controlled for a reason. Magnus still wished he had some furtive way to reach Izzy. Someone from the Institute had sent Lorenzo here, to this house with Magnus's thaumaturgical fingerprints all over it, with surgical precision.

That boded ill not only to himself, but anyone—Alec, Isabelle, even Jessamine—tangled in this mess with him. This was the other reason he'd wanted to do this alone. As alone as he could.

"Someone is hexing unwitting mortals right beside your lair, and you haven't even heard?" Lorenzo canted a brow. "I hope this wasn't how well you were informed about magical emergencies while you still had the trust of the community."

Magnus's temper leaped against the chains he'd wrought for it. He could only inveigle and obfuscate for so long. Sooner or later, Lorenzo would find the point amid his gloating, and—and then Magnus would have no way short of magic to stop him.

_It'd be satisfying, though, to crack his smug face on the sidewalk a few times. Before he sent me to the Spiral Labyrinth dungeons, of course._

"There you are!" said Isabelle, her voice all silky cheer, from behind them. "Sorry, I got turned around on the way." Her work boots, sleek and stylish as they were, made a softer noise on the asphalt than her usual heels.

"Here I am, and now you've found me." Magnus half-turned to receive her, so only she would see the split second of sheer confusion on his face. "Don't worry. I ran into some good company, as you can see."

Lorenzo pivoted to her only a fraction behind him. "And this is—"

"Isabelle Lightwood." She reached out a hand, daintily. "You must be _señor_ Rey. What a happy coincidence. I was so looking forward to meeting you."

Magnus knew for a fact that she had been incensed over his dismissal. Now, smiling, she shook Lorenzo's hand and crooned a follow-up comment to his slightly puzzled greeting. It made just enough time for Magnus to bank the ruinous flare of his resentment.

"High Warlock Nieves spoke highly of you to my mother," she said. "You'll have to tell me about those shield wards you created for her. My Madrid Institute contacts can't stop talking about them."

"A fan, are you?" Lorenzo said smoothly. "Well, _señorita_ Lightwood, my services come at a price, but I'll be happy to discuss the workmanship."

"I wouldn't dream of anything else. It's a point of pride for the New York Institute that we compensate all warlocks fairly, no, Magnus?"

"Quite," said Magnus, reeling back through the many times he'd rendered aid and succor to a bunch of young Shadowhunters in over their heads and not been paid a penny. "I've never had cause to complain."

Izzy shot him a glance. He shot one back, hoping they were of a mind in this.

"Perhaps you can pick this up later?" he continued. "We have some business at present, Isabelle and I."

"That would be?" Lorenzo scented blood in the water. It was too late for easy disengagement.

"I'm tracking a rare wandering demon that was sighted in this borough last week." Izzy didn't even blink. "We got an ichor sample from a kill, and I asked Magnus to help me establish its movements. At his usual rate, plus hazard pay, of course."

"Warlock tracking has more finesse, as you know." Drawing himself up straight, Magnus slid into the narrative. "The time of day is a minor inconvenience, but anything to keep New York safe. Aren't you making use of the midnight hour, as well?"

Lorenzo twitched quite enjoyably at that. It lasted for all of a blink, before he sallied forth with, "If you're aware that it's midnight, Bane, then you also know I can _smell_ a spell above us. Right where that Shadowhunter said there was a mundane victim."

"I'm sorry?" Izzy said, as Magnus choked on a breath. "Where did you hear that? We don't have any operations in this area right now."

More cards to the card house, even as it teetered under a draft.

"From one of yours." Lorenzo unfolded a note from his pocket. "This fire message came from a nephilim, that's certain."

She skimmed the note, her face a mask of tepid interest. "It was sent by rune. Would you like me to call the Institute? There must be some mistake."

 _When you're down to saying "there must be some mistake", nothing good ever follows._ Magnus gave a short but profound consideration to testing his old memory charm on Lorenzo. Whether it worked or not, the results would be disastrous.

"Or, Miss Lightwood, there's the possibility that you're in cohorts with Bane here."

Magnus became conscious of his right forearm throbbing. He was thinking so furiously that it doubled as an effective wall for the link, but the pain came through in a muted pulse. Was Alec hurt? How well did the phantom ache reflect actual pain? Worry tightened his chest. He almost reached deeper into the connection.

"Shall we go up?" Izzy motioned at the building, and Magnus's attention jarred back to the moment. "To take a closer look."

They needed Lorenzo off their backs, not to humor the bastard. At least Izzy's phone wasn't issuing any alerts, such as would be sent if the Head of the Institute were down.

"To—Isabelle, please. I know you always want to bend an ear to all parties, but Lorenzo is clearly in error here."

"Am I?" Glee of some unholy sort crooked Lorenzo's smile. "I think we should do as Miss Lightwood suggests. If there's no magic afoot, it will be my mistake. If there is..."

"The High Warlock must know," Izzy said. "Needless to say. Make sure your glamours are up."

With that, she sketched a rune on the front door, the lock undid itself, and she led Lorenzo, and perforce, Magnus, up the tidy if stagnant-smelling stairwell. The ache in his arm had faded some but not stopped.

 _Keep your head. Alec can handle himself._ Besides, Institute intel notwithstanding, Alec had a lifeline in his _parabatai_ that did not weaken with distance. Magnus needed to focus on Lorenzo and the calamity brewing right in front of him. If they failed here, the fallout would hit Alec full force, too.

Izzy gestured to Lorenzo. "If you could point out where the magic seems to be coming from?"

Lorenzo, tall with righteous affront, cleared his throat. "It was around the third floor."

"After you, then, please."

With the roiling of his thoughts, Magnus was half happy to let her steer the fast unraveling ruse. Too much input, too little time to process it. He stopped for a second—for as long as he dared—and extended his senses. There should've been active magic above them, detectable with a minor effort, but it eluded him. Had so much of his sensitivity depended on his bond with the city, the mystical mandate of the High Warlock that had been shifted from his shoulders?

On the third landing, Lorenzo tarried a moment, and then pointed at a door with a cheerily painted _Welcome_ sign hung on it. His heart sinking, Magnus recognized it from his previous visit. He saw Izzy's throat move as she swallowed. A flickering light fixture surrounded them with skittish shadows.

 _Oh, hell. Here we go._ They'd only stalled the inevitable.

Just as Izzy put her ear to the door to listen, the sudden slap of running feet came from behind it, followed by the ragged, unfortunate sound of someone vomiting. An interior door groaned, and a female voice rose in query. Lorenzo frowned in what Magnus took to be distaste.

"Perhaps this isn't the moment to intrude," Magnus ventured. "Are you quite sure this is the place?"

Not all of it was distaste: for a fleeting instant, Magnus got to witness Lorenzo Rey utterly, magnificently bamboozled. Then umbrage took over.

"What did you _do_? Where is it?"

"I beg your pardon?" Magnus didn't even have to pretend at surprise. His heart thundered with hope and alarm. What had just happened?

"It's _not here,_ " Lorenzo hissed. "There's not a trace of magic on this floor, or anywhere nearby, besides the stink of your glamour."

Magnus pressed a hand to the breast of his impeccably tailored winter coat and donned his best unjustly wounded expression. "You do know it shows a shocking lack of tact to comment on another warlock's magical tells. None of us can help them."

"I'm sorry to interrupt—" Somehow, Izzy had found the time to produce her phone and was staring at a message display "—but Magnus and I really need to get back on that demon's trail before it cools. If you can't find anything here, we should move on."

"I—" Lorenzo looked a little red around the ears. Magnus didn't dare slacken his attention enough to let his senses roam, but Lorenzo appeared convinced by his own. "You did something. I will find out, and you'll face the consequences you've managed to evade so far."

"When you have something to charge me with that'll actually hold water, I'm sure the Council will hear it." Magnus made himself flat, still, unruffled. All that mattered was getting Lorenzo gone, by hook or by crook. "Until then, maybe you should let us work."

"Watch yourself, Bane. This is _my_ city now."

With that, Lorenzo snapped open a portal and vanished into it. The backdraft of the spell blew out the dying lamp above them.

"It'll be your city when I'm dead and done," Magnus muttered into the twilight of the stairwell.

* * *

Izzy's stele chimed as she activated a rune sketched below her clavicle. She exhaled in a rush. "Oh, thank the Angel. I can't see the energy pattern of your spell. I think it worked."

Magnus, his heart still speeding, let his impassive facade drop. His head felt like a whirlpool. "Would you care to edify me, too, as to exactly what worked?"

Behind the door, muffled movement continued, water running, voices muttering. He'd expected to feel the aura of his own magic clinging to the Lindberg sisters, but came up with nothing when he probed the air. As if—as if they'd had time to complete the purging charm before Lorenzo had wrenched their plan.

"Let's get outside first," Izzy said, and on second thought, that was a capital idea.

Her composure lasted until they crept out of the stairwell to the backyard of the house, nestled between the surrounding buildings. A swing set flowering with rust rattled in the wind, illuminated by the warm yellow bulb of a lone yard lamp.

Leaning against the lamppost, she broke into gasping giggles. "Next time the burglary also involves high-speed lying to the slimiest warlock in New York, warn me in advance? I was really running out of bluff material by the end. But _it worked._ "

"It was quite the caper, no?" Magnus allowed what was probably his first real smile in days onto his face. Her shoulder shook as he clasped it, and they laughed off the rest of their agitation, steadying themselves on one another. They'd pulled it off. Somehow.

Impossibly.

"You lit the incense," he said, certain now. "How? You weren't gone long enough."

"Fourth rule of shadowhunting," she said, as if he were supposed to know what rules one, two and three were. "Never go out alone."

The service ladder at the corner of the building shuddered with movement, startling Magnus into looking up. A cognizance of dull hurt bloomed in his arm again, a mirrored pain that filled out into a different, throat-squeezing ache of his own.

He stood, stalled by realization.

Alec swung himself down from the ladder, his honed balance marred as his right hand slipped the rung and fell to his side. His torn jacket sleeve showed a red, jagged gouge down the forearm. Magnus's fists curled shut: he deadened his first raw instinct to go to Alec, smothered the healing spell sparking unbeckoned at his fingertips.

Alec needed help. In the circumstances, Magnus wasn't sure he had the right to give it.

Izzy took the step he couldn't take, her stele already out. "Are you okay? What happened?"

"Slipped and scraped my arm on the gutter," Alec said. "It nicked a tendon. My fingers are kinda—just draw an _iratze_ for me. I can't draw steady, but it's not bad."

This particular _not bad_ might've caused permanent damage to an ordinary mortal. Shadowhunters were made of more resilient stuff: Izzy's sure-stroked healing rune sealed the wound, and Magnus sighed in covert relief as the pain twinging in him receded. Alec worked the fingers of his right hand testingly.

"Better?" Izzy's voice was low, meant for Alec alone.

"I'm good." He put his mended arm around her. This close, Magnus had no way of ignoring the brief calm that welled from Alec as he hugged his sister. His strenuous avoidance of any contact with Alec suddenly seemed hollow and petty, a fragile self-deception that he'd thought a necessary protection.

However easily Izzy had erased the injury, Alec had been hurt, playing their backup. Izzy had lied to Lorenzo to his face, smoothly as you please, to cover for Magnus.

"I heard the portal open," she said, as she broke the hug. Alec shifted back so she was halfway between him and Magnus. "So I went around the corner, gave Alec the censer, and came back to you. Alec did the rest."

That had apparently involved scaling a building wall, sneaking in a window, and spreading the incense so it had cleansed all dregs of the potion's magic in the time Izzy—and Magnus himself, unwittingly—had been able to buy. All under Lorenzo's nose.

Warlocks couldn't detect runic magic without specific spells, since its seraphic tint ran counter to the infernal origin of their power. It was part of why Magnus had wanted a Shadowhunter for company.

He'd gotten two. Shame and pride pulled him in two directions, neither of them toward Alec. Even at his full, imposing height, Alec looked as wan and worn as he felt through the link that could not lie. Stress or exhaustion had pressed lines under his eyes.

 _Oh, my dear._ Magnus only ever called Alec that, or any variant of it, with at least a dash of whimsy or humor. The sincere weight of such small words always seemed like too much. Even after taking Alec to his bed, after hearing him confess his love, after breaking off their fledgling relationship when both duty and his own hurt had dictated it.

They'd come back from that, survived the near end of the whole Downworld, and now there was this. Whenever Alec was near enough for the connection to be at full strength, Magnus felt stripped of any defense, flayed open by the presence of the man he loved better than he'd loved anyone in a century. It seemed an unbearable breach of not only his privacy, but his self and all its shadows. It came too close to piercing his most guarded secrets.

It was a trespass. A strange kind of sacrilege. Alec was blameless in it.

Magnus made himself look squarely at both Alec and Izzy; her shoulder blocked the straight line that ran from him to Alec. A watchful gesture. He'd given her cause for it. "Thank you for your help. Both of you."

"Any time," Izzy said, breezy in contrast to her posture. "You know it."

She meant it. That was the worst part.

She'd known all along that Alec was following them. If Magnus were to hazard a guess, she'd asked him to, or at least floated the idea. Alec was far more likely to withdraw, bending to Magnus's obvious demand for solitude.

And Magnus _had_ demanded it. Not in so many words, but by throwing up one barbed wall after another between them, ever since this had started.

Yet here Alec was. Without him, they'd never have succeeded.

"What do we do now?" Alec pointed the question to the middle of their huddle. "There's still the other four cases." Not counting him and Magnus.

"Now," Magnus said, his tongue leaden, "I have to go see that the purging charm didn't have any aftereffects. I've got a second batch of incense I'm hoping to use tonight, but I need to be sure first. That it works right."

"Okay." Alec had never been so businesslike with him, not even in the first days of their acquaintance. _How well do we know each other, even now? How do I presume to know how he'd act in this situation?_

Alec needed a way to protect himself, too. No one could stand to be laid so bare to someone else without break or reprieve. And if Magnus hadn't been wilfully blind to the answer, he'd at least overlooked it: Alec had been bonded to Jace for half his life. Of course he knew how to preserve his sense of self with another person sharing his emotions.

If Alec sensed that inescapable sting of guilt, his face didn't show it.

"I hate to say it, but there's more, Alec." Izzy straightened her collar with a tug. "Somebody at the Institute contacted Rey. I'm marked as off duty for tonight, but I told Rey I was on a tracking mission and I'd asked Magnus to help me."

"Classified mission," Alec said immediately. "We didn't want the kids to get excited about this rare demon."

For a second, Magnus sank into watching how they picked up the ends of each other's thoughts and kept weaving in new threads, easy as breathing. It lit a flash of bittersweet yearning in him.

"'The kids'?" She laughed. "Look at you, a few months in that pompous leather chair and you're suddenly forty. Anyway. Leak at the Institute. Might want to deal with that."

"I know who it is." Alec folded his arms. "Problem is, if I confront Beauchamp with talking to Rey, we can't solve this on the down low. We haven't exactly been following protocol."

 _Because you're trying to protect me._ Aloud, willing his voice to hold, Magnus said, "Then the best course of action is still the same: solve this as soon as we can."

Izzy nodded; Alec echoed her. Magnus could tell he meant that, though a wary tension crackled at his edges. One way or another, even with him and Alec in the midst of an ongoing fight _and_ the ongoing mental link, Magnus still had their loyalty. These pushy young Shadowhunters committed in an alarming fashion.

It was what they knew: bright, unquestioning devotion to whoever would stand beside them in the war they were brought up to fight. Like his myriad deflecting layers and well-worn habits were what Magnus knew.

"We'd best get back to it." Izzy's hand dwelled on Alec's arm. "We can take it from here. I know I stole you from the middle of those evaluations."

"More like rescued me from slowly dying of boredom." Talking to her, Alec relaxed somewhere closer to his normal sardonic humor. That comforted Magnus and raked at him at the same time.

"Actually," he said, "I can take it from here. Lorenzo did me a favor with his portals. They've disturbed the magic currents here so much that a couple of unlocking spells will be lost in the noise. You've done enough for one night. Get yourselves home."

"Right." Alec kept his eyes fixed on his hand as he tightened his ripped jacket sleeve by closing the buckle at the wrist.

A flick of Magnus's fingers would've mended that. He had only to bend his pride to the chance that Alec would reject his help.

He had only to unravel the mess of hurt, guilt and anxiety that had knotted itself between them. Almost from the start, Alec had accepted the touch of Magnus's magic on him, for healing, pleasure or mere convenience. Magnus didn't know if he would this time.

 _This_ was why he'd wanted to stay apart. When Alec was _here,_  present and real, Magnus had no defense against him in good or ill.

"I should go." He drew a tattered breath. Neither of them seemed able to look at the other.

"Yeah." Alec faltered a little on the word. "We've got work to do."

Isabelle—for a heartbeat, Magnus had forgotten she was still there—cut through the moment, pointing a finger at Magnus. "Text me. And good luck. Come on, Alec."

Once they were gone into the darkness of the yard, Magnus let himself drop against the lamppost. Alec was a fading beacon in his consciousness, a signal in sea fog, betraying no detail but his presence.

He had to set this right. He might as well get started.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Magnus Bane vs. His Own Emotions, round two. Alec also gets a say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much love to alistoney, for being a lovely and enthusiastic first reader for Magnus and Izzy's conversation, and to lutavero, who climbed into my tumblr inbox with squee and pointed questions ♥

_Brunch, you & me. At 11. Don't be late. _

A Greenwich Village address rounded off Izzy's text. Magnus scrubbed the traces of scant sleep from his eyes with a hand, blinking at the hard early-winter sun glaring through the blinds.

Last night lingered in his memory as he went through the motions of his morning: shower, clothes, makeup, an obligatory cup of espresso while he leaned over his latest scribbled observations. Izzy would want a look at them, too. It amused and bemused him how readily he thought that.

When he was done, with a quarter hour to spare, he tucked away his notes and, for the first time in four days, let himself go quiet. Thoughts soft and roaming, the sunlight an illusion of warmth on his cheek as it fell through the parted curtains.

The connection was still and loose in the way that meant Alec was asleep. Rare at this hour, but not out of the question after the night they'd had. _Good._  Magnus found himself glancing at the open door of the bedroom, at the rumpled sheets on his side, the undisturbed bedspread on the other.

It was all too quiet, too static, the bed too wide, the kitchen too orderly. Alec didn't often sleep at the Institute anymore. He'd claimed space here that now rang with his absence.

The hunt for Valentine had cost Magnus both Ragnor and Dot, two beloved companions. The aftermath had cost him the title of High Warlock, and with it his old harmony with the city. But he'd gained something too, in these wild, precarious days. A steady stream of trouble at his door, but also a stirring of something new. Clary, whom he'd watched grow up but never truly got to know. Madzie, thriving under Catarina's watchful eye. New friends, new alliances.

Most wonderful and complicated of all, he'd gained Alec.

The link opened, a languid uncoiling at the end of a dream. Gasping, realizing how far into it he'd slipped, Magnus backed away. Let Alec wake as gently as he could.

At least Magnus could give him that. He sat there, eyes half-closed, for as long as it took Alec to drift out of sleep, for his thoughts to sharpen and brighten, for the first concerns of the day to touch his mind.

Folding away his tangled longings, Magnus rose from the table and went to meet Izzy.

* * *

Magnus had walked past the cozy-looking café Izzy had chosen on several occasions, but had never gone in. She was sat at a green-painted window table under a stained-glass lamp that had collected a fine film of dust. Looking up from her matcha latte, she slid a menu to him across the tabletop.

"Food first," she declared. "The goat cheese and fig jam toast is divine."

"Just as a subtle hint?"

"I'm just saying. It's your culinary loss—or gain."

Quite famished after the night's excitement, he took the hint. The toast did court perfection, and the eggs Florentine were nothing to sneeze at, either. They ate in a silence that knew it was finite in nature, but didn't need to rush to its end point. The other customers, the few that there were, were clustered to the other side of the seating area. A papery-voiced woman and her guitar warbled from a speaker hidden overhead.

Finally Magnus put his plate aside and broke the calm. "I'm afraid there's a problem with the purging charm. It did the job, but there were side effects."

"The kind I don't want to think about in detail after a really good breakfast?" Izzy took the handwritten pages he handed to her. Her expression suggested she was remembering the nauseated noises they'd heard from the apartment the night before.

"It made both sisters rather woefully sick." Magnus sighed into his second cup of coffee. "And some of our victims are more delicate than hearty young adults. So I'm back to the drawing board for a proper counterspell."

She frowned at him in sympathy, then down at his notes. "Mind if I put this in my report? Just for Alec, since we're doing this off the record."

He nodded his agreement. In a more dire situation, he'd have advised the quick purging of the magic regardless, but the potion's effects were curiously circumstantial. The affected mundanes mostly went around their daily business. Magnus did wonder why, then, the connection between him and Alec never shut down. Because they both had the Sight and couldn't help but be aware of the magic?

"I've got something for you from Professor Khouri," Izzy said then. "You said you read better on paper, so I printed it out."

"Mostly it's that finicky electronics and finicky magic in the same workroom don't mix." Magnus accepted the sheaf of printouts in turn. "There's a whole research team in the Spiral Labyrinth knocking their brilliant heads on that mystery."

Among the papers were the images he'd made for her of the potion manuscript, their margins filled with notes in both English and Arabic, and beyond those, scans of some other archaic text, peppered with illuminations of plants and their parts. He recognized a few. A couple of the pictures had been circled with teal highlighter after printing.

"There's an email there that explains everything," Izzy said. "I thought you'd want them as soon as possible."

"An excellent call. Has the situation with Lorenzo developed in my absence?"

"Not in the last ten hours." She smiled dryly. "Alec found Beauchamp a field assignment upstate, so she'll be out of our hair for a couple of days. Official reprimand is out of the question, but I think she got the subtext."

"I doubt that allayed her suspicions much." Magnus took in the information, but his hands tightened on the papers. With a deliberate motion, he put the pile away in his satchel.

 _How is Alexander_ was a redundant question, when Magnus had to actively distract himself so as _not_ to be aware of Alec's prevailing mood, physical comfort, or lack thereof. The connection did not run so deep as to tell him what Alec was thinking. That was a slight mercy in all this. It also clouded the core of Magnus's growing worry.

"Can I ask you something?" Izzy was peering at him from behind her raised mug. "Have you met many Shadowhunters with parabatai?"

"I've known a few." None so intimately as Alec, and there lay the problem. Magnus had an inkling where she was leading the conversation, but he might as well let her. "An ancestor of Jace's, once upon a time."

"That sounds like a story I wanna hear later. You did probably notice I didn't give you anything on parabatai bonds, when you asked what we had on psychic links."

"Let me guess: it's all staggeringly classified."

"Mostly. I thought the materials wouldn't help you much, since this case involves warlock magic, but—" She hesitated. "You might've needed them anyway. Or, not the literature, but some idea about how hard the bond can be on the parabatai."

That was not what he'd been expecting.

Intellectually it was a patent failure not to have considered that Alec was much better equipped to deal with the forced intimacy of the link. Magnus had let his own distress interfere with clear thought.

"I'm listening," he said. They were both hedging a bit.

"This was part of why I never wanted one," Izzy said. "A parabatai. It goes too deep for me. Plus, it's not like suitable candidates for your sworn soulmate-in-arms grow on trees."

Magnus hummed, pensive, recalling a rooftop conversation with Jace in the summer, and the second of vivid horror for which he'd assumed that Jace had been privy to his taking Alec to bed.

 _It's not like that,_ Jace had been quick to correct. _I can sense he's happier._ Thus Magnus had taken another step toward understanding what it meant to love a Shadowhunter that had a parabatai.He had, also, thought it a breach of privacy, no matter how few details had passed through the bond. Alec seemed to have thought nothing of it.

This crisis was at least squarely between him and Alec. The thing that hung in the balance was their relationship, so recently mended.

"We're not exactly discussing a parabatai bond," Magnus said. "The potion's effect _should_ be temporary. By their nature, potion enchantments weaken over time."

"Too slowly for us to wait this out, though." Izzy looked at him with some scrutiny. "From what I can see, the practical effects of the link are similar. Alec and Jace went through months of training—not just for fighting together, but to be prepared for the stress. The Clave has sealed records about parabatai whose bonds went wrong. The... the magic is perfect, but people never are."

Unease cinched Magnus's shoulders. He wondered if Alec could feel it, too, whatever daily task he was at. "What happens to the people who can't handle it?"

 _People,_  he said, too. They were teenagers, barely out of childhood, dreaming of a lifelong unity they could not truly understand.

"Mostly they learn to handle it. The training's thorough. You've never really seen Alec and Jace fight together, have you? They don't need to talk or strategize. They just _do._ So I know how the bond's supposed to work." Izzy shifted in her chair, crossing her right knee over the left, her back straight. "When it doesn't, when the parabatai can't stand the whole truth of each other, it can go badly. There are recorded cases of mental trauma, even permanent instability." Her voice turned carefully clinical toward the end. "Sometimes dissolving the bond helps. Sometimes it's too late."

"The Clave considers this acceptable." Magnus made himself inhale evenly.

"The benefits outweigh the risks. The payoff is a pair of soldiers who fight like a dozen."

This wasn't the time to start challenging truths she took as given. Magnus tamped down the urge and focused on the less comfortable truth at hand. "This is pertinent to Alec's and my case because... you feel I'm not handling it."

"For somebody who got thrown straight into the deep end, you're not doing too badly." She did at least sound sincere. "Alec could always block out the bond when he needed to. It was probably the first time he was better at something than Jace right away. Not counting archery, obviously."

"Or diplomacy, or leadership."

"Fair." Izzy leaned an elbow on the table, sitting forward again. "I did think about sending Jace to give you this talk, but he gets overprotective about Alec."

 _I'm never gonna let anyone hurt him,_ Jace had said that day on the roof. Magnus had unquestionably been included in that list of potential threats to Alec's wellbeing. A mildly juvenile view of things, to be sure, but he felt a prick to his conscience now. He hadn't asked for Alec's side of this preposterous plight. He hadn't left any opening for understanding at all.

"Well," he said to Izzy, "I'm glad for your broader perspective on things."

"Jace would just straight up stab you for messing with Alec." She shrugged airily. " _I_ would destroy everything you hold dear and leave you to perish from despair."

Given the way Alec spoke about his sister and brother as his closest companions, as his partners in crime—when he wasn't instead a semi-willing accomplice hauled into their mischief—Magnus should have expected no less. He should have hoped for no less.

He made a face at his empty cup. "Your point is made, Isabelle. If this was the point you wished to make. I know I've behaved abysmally."

He'd let his suspicion and dread get the better of him. He was still quick to retreat into caution and mistrust that had, this time, sharpened into outright antagonism. _Always measure how much you give of yourself to people. Never let anyone know too much._ Too much, and they'd see too deep into his shadows. Too much, and he'd have no protection from their knowledge of him, his love of them, being used against him.

How could he fear both the closeness and the distance?

"Magnus." Izzy's voice called him back from his bleak roaming. She'd come around the table to lean on the corner closest him. "I was angry at you, too. There's more to this than which of us gets to get back at you for hurting our brother."

"If going around the city helping me fix this mess is your idea of getting back at me, I'd call it a little misdirected." The quip was undone by the crack in his voice.

She gave such a slight smile that it barely moved her mouth, but it softened her face. "Maybe. But Alec loves you. Even when he bruises himself on _how_ to love you, it doesn't change the fact that he does."

Magnus bowed his head. Her words pierced a dark place in him, a swollen shadow he'd carried without quite knowing he did. He nodded slowly.

"So you get it when I say I have to love you a little, too, because of him. Enough to help you even when I'd rather kick your ass."

Magnus had no idea what kind of emotional surfeit was bleeding from him into the link. To him it seemed a sudden wheeling tumble from the crumbling ground where he'd made a stubborn stand, arming himself with pride and a single-minded resolution to deal with this alone. Izzy had been a safe associate for the very reason that she'd stuck to the mission.

Until she hadn't. Maybe she'd stopped sticking to it a while ago, and the fact had just escaped him.

_I have to love you a little, too._

"I'm not sure I deserve your regard, really." He winced at the way his words rasped.

"No, but you might need it. You think I've never been mad at one of my brothers while I've dragged them out of some stupid bind?" Without asking, she laid a hand on his where he was gripping his knee too hard. "It's what you do for family."

The touch was soft: offered, not pushed. If he moved away, she'd let him go. The other offer, the one she'd spoken, was more momentous: not pity or mercy, but acceptance, the kind that would not be withdrawn.

Magnus turned his hand so he could clasp Izzy's fingers, gently, as she dropped into a crouch that brought her a little below his eye level. She was two thirds his size and still making herself small.

He tightened his hold. "I'll talk to Alec."

"Good." Warmth glowed through her careful poise. "I wasn't really looking forward to destroying everything you love. Since what you could use is a hug."

"From a Shadowhunter, in broad daylight?" Magnus heard himself chuckle, a touch damp. "Well. I have little reputation left to ruin."

With a humming laugh of her own, Izzy wrapped her arms around him. He held her close and permitted himself the reprieve and the wonderment that came with the gesture.

They stood together for a long moment, before going their ways into the day.

* * *

Magnus walked home, letting the crisp air clear his head. The sun had burned away last night's frost on windows and rainwater ponds. No route was truly unfamiliar, so he took the one that compelled his feet, through the city that was content to show her sweeter side. All he felt from Alec was a contained stream of thoughts, like listening to voices in the next room with your ear to the door.

It stood to reason, painfully, that Alec would be adept at hiding himself in this way as well. Sometimes Magnus forgot how Alec had been at first: perennially trapped between fascination and repression, shining with curiosity one moment and balking the next. But he'd always been kind, even when he'd fumbled with grasping the attraction between them.

Magnus had gotten too used to being the one with the answers. Alec had shattered his well-worn status quo. Magnus had been happy to be surprised as long as he still had the—not the lead in the relationship, no, he'd been careful to follow Alec's cues—but the keys to his own unturned locks, the secret spaces where no one had trod for years.

Had he planned to share them all with Alec? He'd never answered that for himself.

At that, there was a questing tremor through the link, as if Alec had lapsed into thinking about him. Magnus forced himself to run through the verses of 'To Autumn', then moved on to what snippets of 'Ode to Psyche' he could recall to cover the rest of the way.

Thankfully his workroom was an instant distraction. He'd summoned his old blackboard out of storage when the profusion of note sheets had grown too great. It stood wedged between the tables in its oak-framed glory, his chalky script traversing it like river branches.

Tomorrow would be a full moon night. The bane of many skin-changers, but also a boon for anyone working at magic. If he could be ready to make a remedy by then, there was no more opportune time than midnight at full moon. That gave him a provisional twenty-four hours to absorb and apply Izzy's new information and build from there.

To reach a solution he could present to the Institute. To Alec.

 _You gave Izzy your word,_ he reminded himself.

He had, but would it not be better to have something concrete to offer when he went to see Alec? A cure for what ailed them. An olive branch. If he could find one.

For a minute Magnus let himself miss Catarina and the bygone times when they—together with Ragnor—would come up with a magical conundrum and sink days into uninterrupted study and debate. He'd been reporting his progress to her, but she was swamped at the hospital. This time, he had to manage without his esteemed partner in crime.

He spread out the annotated manuscript pages and the excerpts from the Arabic herbarium, and got to work.

* * *

Tuesday evening, Magnus did not see the full moon rise, thanks to the rain drizzling down on Brooklyn, but he felt the change in the atmospheric magic around his lair. The world turned its night side to the fore. His magic sighed with yearning, prickling his fingertips as he shut the book he'd had open.

Fueled by takeout and caffeine and a motivational shot of whiskey when all else had failed, he'd made progress. Professor Khouri's notes had helped him find the right base for the counterbrew. The new formula he'd begun on the blackboard was coming along.

It was not complete. It was the golden hour for spellwork, and in spite of his near-sleepless efforts, he was not ready.

The original potion was a delicate construct, designed to help the subject with an objective named as the potion was finished. Magnus had never made it that far in his brewing attempts. Yet somehow the magic had _acquired_ purpose, whether it was shared vigor, shared rest, or shared sensation.

Phantom exertion quickened his limbs, followed by a sense of clean focus. Alec was sparring, Magnus guessed, his mind uncommonly free, driven by a simple goal, an enviable lucidity. Magnus shook his own heavy head.

Why had the original maker even built the charm as a potion? A potion wasn't optimal for such flexible magic in the first place. One brew, one purpose—that was the idea. A ritual would serve much better when you needed to adjust parts of the charm case by case.

He stared at the one major gap in his countercharm. Along the edges of the blackboard, frustrated arabesques hemmed the formula where he'd doodled them in stymied moments. A repeated pattern with controlled variations.

Half on a whim, Magnus leaned back—or in—toward Alec and slowly, consciously, let himself share in the clarity that filled the link. It was not unlike a plunge into deep water: all sensory diversion muted, his body suddenly lightened. Magnus had no idea what Alec was doing, specifically, but he knew how it made Alec feel. Calm, present, in control. It cut away everything inessential. It made things make sense.

_A ritual would serve much better._

Magnus broke away from the connection, his epiphany loud enough to drown it out.

"Oh, Azazel's unnameable parts," he said to the forbearing silence of his workroom.

He had it. He knew how to create the countercharm. There was only one problem, and for that, he needed to meet his promise to Izzy.

He wrote in the missing part of the formula on the blackboard, stepped into the living room, and called up a portal.

* * *

Fixing his appearance with perfunctory tugs of magic as he went, Magnus strode through the Institute. For once his mind was too occupied to care if he bumped into a sneering nephilim while tousled by work.

Wood clacked on wood in the high-walled training hall as he approached its half-open door. The ceiling sent the echoes of the bout down the corridor.

"I've told you a hundred times, Fray. Watch your right!"

The sound of Alec's voice hitched Magnus's pace. Scuffing steps followed the admonishment, then the rapid clatter of Clary apparently flying at her stern instructor again, fighting sticks leading. Magnus braced himself and entered the hall.

He was greeted by Clary's victorious shout and a stick rolling across the smooth stone floor until it shored up by the doorjamb next to his foot.

"I _got_ you," she crowed merrily. "I got you fair and square!"

"Great, so that's six to one for me—" Alec stopped in mid-turn. His whole attention jerked like a tapped nerve. The shock of his surprise froze Magnus, too, as Alec stared at him in the doorway as if he'd just fallen through the ceiling in a shower of masonry.

Magnus forced his tongue to move before his resolve deserted him. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but I need to speak with you."

It wasn't polite. It was as close to the truth as he could get in words.

Clary stepped through the line of sight that was drawn taut between him and Alec, and picked up the rogue stick. "This is a wild guess, but you mean Alec and not me?"

Magnus blinked, grateful for her snapping at least some of the tension. "Yes, Biscuit, this time I do. If you could—"

"What do you want?" Alec crossed his arms, his other fighting stick gripped in his left fist. The wide soaring calm of the spar was draining from him, and his sides rose quickly under his sweat-stained shirt. Magnus would've appreciated his dishevelment much more if he wasn't also radiating unease.

"A moment of your time," Magnus said. "If you'd be so kind."

Alec weighed that. He either couldn't or didn't bother to hide his ambiguity. Clary darted to the side to put away the three sticks in her possession, but Magnus kept still. A flat refusal from Alec was a possibility. If Magnus had stayed to think through all the things that could foil him here, he'd never have come.

"Okay." Alec's gaze flickered away and back to Magnus. "I'm listening."

"I promised Izzy gelato and a movie," Clary sort of stage-whispered to Magnus. "So I'm gonna go now. See you later."

"Thank you, my dear." He patted her arm. "Give Isabelle my best." Izzy had certainly earned ice cream in good company, after shuttling between him and Alec all weekend. He'd have to send her a token of appreciation later. Assuming he didn't absolutely botch this first.

Waving to Alec, who acknowledged her goodbye with a nod, Clary slipped out of the hall. The door swung shut behind her, and the dull thud reverberated in the lofty space.

Magnus dropped his hands to his sides before they could knot together. His nerves were palpable even if he didn't let his body language run wild—unless that made it vain to even pretend at serenity. He looked at Alec and a part of him wanted nothing more than to keep looking, to drink in Alec's presence, the immutable truth of him, the familiar lines of his body, even when they folded warily inward.

Alec would look back until Magnus opened the conversation. A couple of glib lines— _So, the Head of the Institute is personally tutoring the rookies now?_ —rose and died unspoken.

"I have little right to ask you for anything right now," he said carefully, "but I found a way we can solve this. The mental link, the misfired charms. Properly this time."

"That's good," Alec said. "You couldn't just send a fire message?"

He stood stock-still, straight as the columns lining the hall. It broke Magnus's heart a little. Alec only ever seemed to be able to shut himself in if he went all the way into a glacial stillness that encased him without fault or fracture. Anything less, and something—fascination, annoyance, amusement—would leak through. He'd still done it for years. Until Magnus had come along.

_I did this to him. I pushed him back into that cell he built for himself._

"I thought it'd be better to come myself." Magnus stiffened his spine. "Time is of some essence. It's a slightly unorthodox solution, and tonight is—"

"The full moon. I know what that means." Alec's jaw worked minimally. Magnus could hear the echo of his own jab at Alec's ignorance of his work, from when they'd argued a few days ago.

"Yes. It also means that what I have in mind is a touch jury-rigged, but the conditions are strongly in favor. And I would..." He pressed a fingernail to his own palm. "I'd prefer to have this over sooner rather than later. I'm sure you agree."

"Yeah." Alec seemed to choke on the single syllable. Anger, not anxiety. "Like you're sure about everything else. Including what I think about this."

"Alec."

"Why'd you come here?" Alec lifted his chin, eyes to the side, a gesture at once defiant and vulnerable. "You don't wanna be anywhere near me right now, and at least when you're over in Brooklyn, I can stop it. Most of the time."

Magnus held himself back from approaching him. "I know this has been hard on you. I can't have made it easier."

"Stop." The stick fell to the floor as Alec held up a warning palm to him. "Just stop. I'm—I can't do this, Magnus. I can't deal with all the weirdness with Jace after Lake Lyn and run the damn Institute without spilling your secrets _and_ avoid you so I don't aggravate you somehow, okay?"

Oh. Anger _and_ anxiety, most definitely. The link churned with a rush of conflicting emotion.

"You and Izzy have been more than patient, and I appreciate that." Magnus took a step to the side before the restless energy in him overflowed.

"Do you? You know what I've been doing while you disappeared into your books and didn't call me one time in five days?" Alec didn't shout. He spoke in a cracked staccato, made rough by hurt. "I'm used to Jace. I'm used to him getting pissed off at me and blocking me out. But now there's two of you in my head all the time, and it's a little crowded when _you_ don't have any idea how to stay quiet, and you won't even let me—" Alec bit off the end, but Magnus felt the ache the cropped-off words roused in him.

It was terrifyingly hard to have a fight when you knew every concealed pain, every sore place that the argument stabbed into.

The last thing Magnus had come here to do was to get into another quarrel. Alec was tense along his entire lanky frame, his muscles coiled unpleasantly. Rain drummed against the tall windows and made their dim multi-colored shadows run and waver on the floor.

"I won't let you what?" Magnus canted his head cautiously.

"It doesn't matter." Alec turned away. "Just tell me what you came here for. I'll get it done. Clary's taking Izzy out, so she's not here, but she briefed me on everything."

Here was the loyal soldier, the dutiful son, the devoted Head of the Institute. Magnus had no sight of Alec's face, but his tone was well familiar, and it struck Magnus like a jagged stone.

 _You never have to pretend how you feel. Especially not with me._ Alec had said that to him not long ago. In the moment it felt like a lifetime. Like these five days had smashed to pieces the closeness they'd painstakingly rebuilt after their reunion.

"Oh no, you don't," Magnus muttered, and stepped up to Alec.

They couldn't surprise each other right now, not at this distance: Alec must have sensed the sharp edge of his intent before he moved. Still, Alec only started when Magnus was near enough to touch him.

"I'm sorry." After a moment's hesitation, Magnus reached up to cup Alec's cheek.

Something bloomed open between them. Alec's bare skin under his bare fingers. Alec, heartsore and careworn, as much at his wits' end as Magnus had felt since last week. The thrum of his heart faint as a whisper under his skin.

Alec's expression twisted. With a ragged, razor breath, he pulled away. The connection furled tighter again with the loss of contact, and Magnus felt stunningly, ludicrously bereft.

"Don't do that." Magnus half expected to see a bruise darkening Alec's face where he'd laid his hand. "Just—what do you want?"

"To know what's wrong. Beside the obvious." Magnus kept his hands close to his body, palms open. "I know I'm in your head. I can't actually read your mind. I—I've been awful to you ever since this began, or at least callous and thoughtless, and you have every right to be angry."

"I'm not," Alec began, then halted. "Okay, yes, I'm angry. I was. You can sort of tell if I lie."

"Yes. Sort of."

"But, Magnus—I thought we were good. Better, anyway. After the—our breakup and Valentine and everything." Alec seemed to realize he'd circled wide of the actual topic of the conversation and yet be unable to stop. He shifted his weight.

Magnus had to restrain himself from touching Alec again, however badly it'd just gone. He'd had his misgivings after their reunion. It had taken them some time to hit their stride with each other, to reclaim the ease of their togetherness, to make it solid again.

If anything, this last week should have shown him that any doubts he harbored were moot.

"Alexander," he said, softly. "We're fine. At least for my part. I know we argued, but this has nothing to do with the breakup, or any of that. It's in the past."

"It kinda feels like it's not." Alec shut his eyes. Again his body language skimmed the border of bared and guarded. "When this whole thing with your potion experiment started, you went off on your own. I thought you trusted me at least enough to—to ask for help if you needed it. Not that you ever do need it, but—"

A hushed, bitter laugh slipped from Magnus. Oh, irony. The connection made it impossible for them to be anything but honest, and Alec's raw hurt made it impossible for Magnus to feel anything but tender toward him.

But Alec didn't, at least right now, think himself worthy of any tenderness. How could he, when the whole idea was so brittle for him? When it meant exposing himself and that seemed unbearable?

So, instead of another attempt at reassurance, Magnus said, "I came here to ask for your help. I didn't feel right to begin with that."

"Right. Well, shit." Alec breathed once, in and out, collecting himself or his thoughts. His stance relaxed marginally. "Look at us."

 _Failing at the fine art of communication again,_ Magnus would've added in a lighter context.

"Your sister said something to me." He tugged at his ear cuff. It was really becoming too much trouble to watch his hands. "About helping those you love even when you're feeling uncharitable toward them. You've been doing that for me all week."

"I've been trying. Wasn't sure how well it was working."

"It was crucial," Magnus admitted, and it felt like no hardship at all. It felt like relief. "I have amends to make to you. You have to know that. But if we're going to put an end to this mess, tonight is our best chance."

" _Our_ best chance?" Alec let out a sound between a chuckle and a huff. He bit the corner of his lip.

"I have a plan," Magnus said, "and I believe we can use the link to make it work."

The emotion welling from Alec was hard to describe: it came inescapably, like he couldn't have suppressed it with any effort, and it braced him again, like a firm foothold after a treacherous path. There was resolve in it, and a small, heady dash of satisfaction.

He looked straight at Magnus then. "Okay. I'm in."


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Advanced potion-making for dummies, a terrible case of unresolved longing, and a little help from an unexpected party.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Agathe for first reading ♥
> 
> Yeah, I really wrote 20K+ of established relationship with abject pining all over the place. I am a parody of myself.

The loft wards blinked to let Alec in half a step behind Magnus, and the quiet, dusky space hummed in wordless elation.

Alec paused as if to take in the loft in turn, as Magnus went ahead, switching on the lights with flourishes of his hand. The living room betrayed his recent preoccupation in its dusting of disorder: dishes on the coffee table and books on every other surface, from priceless tomes to old notebooks he'd dug up, hunting for details of research from decades ago. A jacket he'd shrugged off onto the couch cut a wrinkle of blue on the black leather. The air smelled like caramel and doused embers, magical residue he only noticed now that he'd been away.

"You've been busy." Alec picked his way through the scattered archipelago of stuff.

"Rather so." Magnus frowned at a mug and banished it to the kitchen sink. "If I put the books back now, I'll lose the order they're in."

"Guess I've never seen you in the middle of an actual research episode."

"This would qualify as an _episode._ " Magnus tried the mood. It skirted near to their customary banter, though Alec's bearing—and the feel of him through the link—was watchful. "Can I get you anything before we begin?"

"Uh, thanks, I'm good." Alec looked nothing out of the ordinary, in his dark henley and comfortably worn jeans, his hair towel-scrubbed and certainly finger-combed in testimony to their swift departure from the Institute. Magnus had waited barely twenty minutes in the foyer for him to shower after the interrupted training session.

Alec's mussed hair, the familiar line of his jaw when he tried not to smile. Magnus quelled the foolhardy desire to touch either.

He'd spent a week trying not to miss Alec. Having Alec in the middle of this homely chaos, casual and warm-cheeked in spite of his alertness, did nothing to lessen the feeling.

They'd made a truce. Peace was an open question.

"Of course," Magnus said. "Over here."

Alec followed him to the workroom. With twists of magic, he set one of the worktables: burner, flasks, measures, the burnished copper cauldron etched with protective sigils to muffle most hazards a brewing mishap might cause.

Alec leaned his hands on a table and watched him, and his observation raised a shiver along Magnus's spine. _Rein it in, Bane. You're only about to drop whatever guard you have left and let him in on this wildly improvised magical working._

"So." Magnus went to the sundries shelf and busied his hands with the jars and pots. "You know the basic division of warlock magic. Potions, rituals, ad hoc spells. These are the generally accepted categories."

"Yeah."

"The cardinal rule is: like counters like. A banishment ritual sends away a demon brought into the world with a summoning. A cure-all potion heals the effects of magical poisons."

"That's why the purging incense." Curiosity, faint but irrepressible, glinted in Alec. "Because the original thing was... smoke of some kind."

"Applied as an aerosol, in any case." Magnus piled the ingredients onto the table. "Here lies the problem: the original thing isn't supposed to be only a potion. It combines with a ritual element, but the author doesn't mention that in so many words."

Alec glanced at the vellum manuscript that Magnus had unrolled on a side table. It was shielded with half a dozen wards, since he'd needed to work with the original. "You just figured that out? From context? There seems to be a lot they won't come out and say."

"Remind me to read you some contemporary poetry some time. The Islamic masters may enjoy their subtle devices even more than the Chinese."

"I'll take your word for it." Levity threaded its way between them like a seeker through a maze.

"But yes, I deduced it from context," Magnus said. "The author writes for an audience in their own time. They assume that mixing ritual and potion-brewing is an everyday idea for the reader." He paced around the table. "I was taught under much later traditions. It's like, say, modern studies trying to replicate Roman concrete without implicitly understanding that the mixture uses seawater instead of fresh water."

Alec narrowed his eyes. A light had kindled in them. There was a tug in the link, something yanked backward before it could squirm to the surface.

Well. At least Magnus wasn't alone in his distraction.

"So, what did you want me for?" The phrasing was blunt, but Alec's timbre turned the question tentative.

Magnus smiled, sloped to one side. "Your sharp eye and your steady hand."

"You want me to—help you brew this thing." Alec raised his hand at the blackboard.

"Yes. This is a bit experimental, but what it boils down to is, the countercharm is a two-person effort. Tending the potion and working in the ritual components at the right time will be rather complex. With more time I could refine the process, but..."

"I have to ask." It was almost a confession, the way Alec said it, the way it rang in Magnus's mind. "Why me? Why not Catarina or any other warlock you know? I get I don't have to have magic to follow your instructions. It's just." He stopped.

 _Because Cat is busy saving lives and raising her daughter._ That was as it was and would be, and Magnus was glad for that. It wasn't what Alec should hear now. Nor was it the whole truth.

"This connection between us. It was an accident, or so I thought." Magnus went to the manuscript. "I've had to revise that opinion."

Alec came to stand by his shoulder, but said nothing.

Magnus pointed at a passage. "Here. It says, literally, _Empty your heart._ It's a touch convoluted, so I thought it was only a poetic aside. It's an instruction. Finishing the charm demands complete calm as you name the objective. Every time I got this far, I had something else on my mind. I was pondering some other part of the process, or tiring out, or..."

"Or getting fed up with me."

"Or getting fed up with you." His hand pressed diligently to his leg, Magnus leaned his shoulder a finger's width from Alec's. "The fundamental purpose of the charm is affinity. A harmony of intentions. Mutual success. So it opened up something between us that would enable that."

As he spoke, the prickle of Alec's attention crept on him like the dawn on a sleeper's last dream. The line of Alec's arm was a ghostly pressure against his own. The idea of a handclasp flickered unfulfilled.

They both shifted back a notch.

"That's amazing." Alec said, tinged with wonder. "The way you talk about this, it's almost like the magic's got a will of its own."

"I've been at this warlocking business for four hundred years. The only thing I can say for sure is that there's always more to it than I think. Sometimes that's a good reminder."

Alec surveilled the blackboard, where Magnus had laid out the stages of the countercharm. In hindsight it was fortunate he'd made his notes in English this time; he tended to switch between languages, depending on the research. "So we just need to do what you did first, but backwards."

Alec sounded nearly eager. The deepening night was another presence in the back of Magnus's head, a silent, beguiling pull. It was time.

"I wanted you here because I need someone I trust. Because, right now, if we want to, we can understand each other from half a word."

A clean sharp feeling ran to him from Alec, nudging Magnus, too, into an easy alertness. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?"

Some day Magnus would get used to Alec's capacity for seizing the moment. He'd done his weighing, come to a conclusion, and committed himself. No hesitation.

Magnus sifted through the ambient magic in the air, ripe and rich with possibility. The moon was full and the night circling to its crest. It felt like he could spin a miracle.

"Well, then," he said, and let the last half-futile barrier between them tumble.

They slid into each other like a hilt into a waiting hand, like ink into the grain of fine paper. Alec's apprehension and excitement fluxed around the edges of his focus. This was unknown ground, but Alec had a pinnacle, a beacon burning across the dark. He had Magnus.

The realization almost staggered Magnus out of the untroubled harmony he'd felt for a second.

"Sorry." Alec _tugged_ at something that steadied them both again. "It's, uh, it's different, now that you're all here."

"I wasn't before?"

"You were, but you didn't want to be," Alec spoke matter-of-factly, but the thought was shot through with hurt. That was the price of this rapport: near-absolute honesty, on a whole new scale.

"You're right," Magnus said. "This will take several hours, but after that, we'll talk."

"Yeah." Alec gestured at the blackboard. "Walk me through this."

* * *

Magnus took his place and beckoned the first filigree threads of the magic into being. This was no grandiose summoning, or the rupture of a portal through the world, elegant and brutal. It was a slow and tempered miracle to be made over hours.

Once the initial pattern rested around him, with him as its watchful nexus, he could spend a little attention on Alec.

Across the table, Alec had gone to one knee to get the amount of moonstone dust perfectly level to the brim of the tiny copper cup. Magnus stifled a smile.

"Don't stare." Alec set the cup aside, with a calm smooth movement, and located the next ingredient.

"I'm not." _I'm appreciating._

"You one hundred per cent are."

"You must forgive me, then." Magnus let his voiceless laughter ripple into the link and heard, to his satisfaction, Alec's breath snag on a chuckle.

Here was another miracle: Alec, frowning, crouched over the measures like a solicitous stormcloud, holding the other half of the charm in his decidedly unmagical hands. Magnus had refused Alec the use of runes, because there was no accounting for how they might disrupt the working.

Alec seemed to have no need of them. He went a step at a time, checked the blackboard, checked Magnus's handwritten labels, and laid out the components in a neat row. With that discipline, Isabelle should have pressed him into service as a lab assistant long ago. Magnus's irreverent byroad earned him a quick glower from Alec.

"You're supposed to _observe_ , so I know if I'm about to fuck something up."

An abrupt smell of lilac and absinthe—neither an actual ingredient here—warned Magnus. He nearly stepped to the burner, where the cauldron was coming to a too-fast boil, when Alec stood in a puff of dried herb and lifted the potion base to safety.

 _Observe_ , Magnus repeated to himself. All Alec had needed had been Magnus's internal realization that a problem was brewing. Literally, in this case.

He set a layer of the ritual over the potion, a whisper-soft net of magic, testing how the effects knitted together. He'd always enjoyed bending magic to new purposes: in itself, magic was potential, both clay to its sculptor's hand and a tool to carve it to your liking. Once you knew its grain and malleability, the ways it'd shape and blend and set, you could, in theory, make almost anything.

Bringing that anything into reality was the hard part. Anyone that thought a warlock could simply conjure what they liked could think again: even Magnus, with the raw power of a prince of Edom in his veins, at the height of his craft and knowledge, had poured blood and sweat into becoming what he was.

This time, he had to call on other virtues than raw power. Maintaining the ritual through the phases of making the potion took concentration and patience and endurance, while Alec stared at the color of the brew and added things at their moments. More than once, he stirred Magnus out of a flat reverie with a soft, "Magnus. Your turn."

The blackboard demanded, and Alec was faithful to its decrees. Magnus worked blood back into his fingers and raised his hands to the task. Part by part, the delicate weavery around the brew grew in complexity. He moved carefully through it and with it, both to keep himself alert and because he'd always guided his magic with motion and gesture. Leaning into the plentiful ambient magic of the night, he spread some of the strain upon it rather than himself.

The hours wound on. Around three a.m., while the potion cooled, Alec went to the kitchen for coffee and sandwiches, which he insisted on bringing to the workroom. He gave the quiescent cauldron a healthy berth.

"If you don't eat, you're gonna faint," he said to Magnus. "I can feel this constant little hum, which I'm guessing is the magic you're holding up, and sometimes you start sinking into it."

Magnus sat down on the floor, in the middle of the invisible skein of his ritual, and ate his sandwich. Alec sat with him, a small distance away, and poured the coffee.

Magnus was more grateful for him than he could express. The way Alec's ears reddened said that the message was received, anyway. How easy it was to slide from anger into appreciation, when the bulwark of that anger was broken.

If pressed, Magnus might have gotten this far alone. He'd found improbable solutions before. When Alec looked at him, eyes sharp in spite of the godless hour of the night, it was easy to nod. _Yes, I'm ready. Let's go on._

The thought was dangerously close to, _With you, I could do anything._

Alec had his hand extended to help Magnus up before he realized it. The moment striking them in the same heartbeat, they both looked down, and Magnus levered himself to his feet alone.

His palm hummed with the memory of Alec's cheek hot and fleeting against it in the training hall. He felt positively Austenian in his abrupt longing for Alec's skin, a handclasp too great a presumption.

"Shall we?" he said, inane.

Alec went back around the table, sliding a thin wedge of distance in between them.

The resting ritual rose to Magnus's touch, fed amply by the full moon night. Without it buoying him up, the spell would've worn him down to exhaustion by now. He breathed methodically, letting each inhalation pull more of the ambient magic into himself and each exhalation thread it into the web of the ritual, fine as smoke or spider silk, intricate as the venation of a leaf.

He felt Alec as separate from the magic: a body moving in the world, and his presence through their spell-forged connection. There was much to be said for his sheer discipline. Magnus had been on the receiving end of that singular focus and stamina in ways he could not dwell on unless he wanted the spell to dissolve in his hands, but now they carried Alec through the work.

A smudge of blue powder glittered on Alec's cheek. It also dusted his hair, as if he'd run a pensive hand through it. _Oh, such a breach of lab protocol,_  Magnus thought with distracted humor.

They were coming to the final part. The weight of the ritual was creeping in on him, pebbles heaping up into a hill all the same. His eye strayed to Alec's hands, unscrewing a lid on a jar of whole, vermilion blossoms, their petals half-wilted and sticking to the glass.

Alec stopped the motion, hesitating as Magnus did. Magnus shifted his posture, as if that'd help him think past the strain.

The flowers looked wrong.

"Smell them," he said. "Carefully. Let me feel it."

The link leaped as Alec opened himself to it fully. Magnus had half forgotten the sensory aspect of it, but there was no margin of mistake in the brimstone smell that seemed to scour his nostrils. Grimacing, Alec drew his face back from the open jar.

"Something's wrong with these."

"It's eye-of-the-phoenix. When a cut flower is exposed to the air, it'll eventually combust. The seal on the jar must have leaked."

"Oh." Alec shut the jar with a firm twist. "Your instructions say the flowers should be fresh."

"Freshly preserved, actually." No, Magnus could not afford to get sidetracked into botanical minutiae. "Right. Let me think."

The lines of the ritual were turning leaden in his grip, and holding them open and separate made all other thought laborious. He'd used up his stock of the flowers in last week's experiments. There was a handful of sellers and markets and, as a last resort, shady dealers in the city that would have a supply, but leaving the workroom would prove a problem. More than a problem. If they had to stop now—

"You've got this plant in the roof garden," Alec said.

Magnus looked up at him like he'd spoken a divine portent.

He hadn't even stepped foot on the roof all week. The garden was largely self-sufficient, with watering charms tailored to each plant and a weather ward strung over the roof to keep the temperature mild and the elements at bay. Still, some of the more delicate herbs had to be drooping by now.

Not the eye-of-the-phoenix, though, tough arid-climate species that it was.

"You'll need the shears," Magnus said. "And gloves. The sap may also combust spontane—"

"Got a heat shield rune." Alec fell into the plan with such ease that Magnus's ribs tightened with something warm and unwise. "Shears. Box by the stairs?"

Magnus had barely nodded when Alec bolted from the room, the spiral staircase rattling under his boots. Magnus let his breath seep from his lungs in an even stream.

In that moment, somewhere beyond the clustered clouds, the setting moon sank below the horizon.

Magnus went to his knees with a bruising impact on the concrete floor. The magic that had been thick in the air began to thin and dry—not all at once, but as a tree sheds leaves, in gusts and spurts that each dropped another fraction of the ritual on his shoulders alone. Sweat sprang to his skin, and his heart kicked up a hard tattoo. He'd stalled the ritual at a point where it wanted to surge forward, all its strands pulling together. Soon it would become like fighting gravity.

 _No_ , he thought, defiant. _We're so close._ His jaw hurt, and he made himself loosen it.

Time turned strange and liquid, like it would when you drank deeply enough of the wellspring of the world. The magic overwhelmed even his awareness of Alec, a pinpoint of tense resolve lost in the rush.

Not long ago, Magnus had all but emptied himself to shut the rift to Edom. It had been a short, stunning effort, whereas this one would pull at him slowly and inexorably until something tore. Either him or the magic.

 _Just a moment longer_. He didn't know if that was true. How long had Alec been gone? Had he come back and Magnus simply could not hear him, could not see him, past his own unfinished magic filling his senses?

He staggered forward, catching himself with a palm to the floor.

Then, gentle coils of power slid under his failing grasp of the ritual and took some of the weight from him. The magic stilled and settled, framed by that same supporting force.

"Alexander?" Magnus called, his voice papery. It didn't feel like Alec. Alec had no power or craft of this kind. His head thrummed like a struck bell.

"Coming!"

Alec's confirmation of his imminent return—and, indeed, of his continued existence—was welcome, but this was not his doing. Magnus sifted out Alec's haste and puzzlement from the power that sang around him, not _of_ him and still feeling like it belonged. It cupped the magic, quiet and steadfast. He dared to draw a deep breath.

 _Don't I know you?_ was his next thought, unbidden and dazed.

Alec broke Magnus out of that musing by stomping down the stairs with all the hustle and noise of a nephilim on a mission. He burst into the workroom, a straggling bouquet of brilliant red flowers in his left hand. Something that looked very much like soot smeared his cheeks.

"Here."

Magnus could have kissed him. Wanted to. Had wanted to since they'd stepped back into the loft, and still it startled him, the desire to run his fingers along Alec's face and stain them, too, to kiss him with all the aching joy and elation that rose when Magnus looked at him.

It was nearly too much. The spell he was holding pulled him one way, his own pent-up feelings another, and then there was—there was the _something_ in the room with them, subtle as a cloud shadow you only noticed when it softened the glare of the sun.

He got to his feet, piecemeal.

"Three whole flowers," he said. "Cut them at the top of the stalk."

"I know. You wrote it down." Alec frowned, Magnus's bemused state bleeding into him, but didn't stop. "Just—hold together."

It was not an idle request, with the ritual suspended on him, its spires and junctures and sweeps a tracery of living magic that strained and bucked to _become._  The potion hissed as Alec added the flowers in, one by one. Magnus made himself take a step, then another, to move his body so the magic could move with him. Him, and the ephemeral presence that called, gentle and unceasing, for his overburdened attention.

He'd heard, of course, of warlocks whose summoning rituals had gone awry and beckoned things they'd never intended. But he'd made no demand, given no invitation in the first place.

"Who are you?" he whispered to the air.

The answer came at once: a weight and a knowing, a flood of filmy memory that had followed him for years, like the laugh of an old, beloved friend heard in a crowd. _I was long in your care, Magnus. You are still in mine._ It wasn't spoken in so many words, but the sentiment rang clear.

He was a fool. He should have known at once.

She—and that choice of pronoun, too, was a fancy of his—was neither spirit nor god, no heavenly or infernal thing. He'd walked her streets and learned her secrets and tended her people. They'd been together a long time, and the loss of a title given and taken by his peers did not matter to her.

He laughed, with hoarse, hysterical mirth. "Oh, my dear."

"Magnus," said Alec's voice, but Magnus didn't quite hear. There was the spell and there was Alec and there was the city, _his_ city, with her roots in the river and her towers scratching the sky, and Lorenzo Rey had his title and his position, but they were not everything. There was the covenant between a High Warlock and their chosen city that made them a warden of its magical places, a keeper of its miracles.

And then, Magnus supposed, a little humbled, there was something like love. Being chosen in turn.

He knew he'd stopped moving. He felt shaken loose from his body, a thread in his own weaving, cradled in her grasp. He could simply stay.

" _Magnus_."

Alec's hands framed his face, steady and warm and real, and Magnus jerked under the sudden clarity of his touch. It drew him back to the workroom, back to the close air pregnant with the smells of herbs and metals and minerals. Alec's face was bent so near his features fuzzed in Magnus's sight.

"Alexander."

"There you are. Don't scare me like that." Alec's thumb tracked the shape of his cheekbone, like it had uncounted times before. "You just... went somewhere. Like before, but deeper."

Magnus worked to wet his mouth. When his forehead fell to Alec's, Alec didn't resist. He just stood like a temple pillar and let Magnus support himself on him. Magnus would've put his hands on him if they weren't full of the spell—the thrumming, thrashing spell that only needed him to wind it all together.

"I'm fine now," he mumbled, as great a lie as he'd ever told. "Alec—I need to—"

"I've got you." Alec did not move. He inhaled slowly, then exhaled, in a rhythm that tasted of childhood lessons and long twilit mornings alone in the training hall, of the tremor of a taut bowstring as he aligned a shot. Calm soaked from him into the link that lay wide open between them, guided by his hands on Magnus's face.

Magnus could think again. He could borrow Alec's quiet unwavering focus to brace his own. The only thing that mattered was finishing the spell; all else would wait.

"Give it to me," he said aloud to the whisper of the city in the room. "I can do the rest."

She laid the charm back in his hands and sank away like a fading breeze. Thread by thread, layer by layer, Magnus braided the magic into a single shimmering whole and made it real.

* * *

Gradually Magnus became aware that his cheek was rather squashed into Alec's shoulder. His insides shivered like he hadn't eaten in too long—an early symptom of casting fatigue. The workroom was silent around them, the air cool and empty in the wake of the completed ritual. Outside, stripes of pale blue dawn peered through the snow-laden clouds streaking the low sky.

Alec yawned above him.

"Sorry." It came out half smothered against a hand, as Alec tilted his head at Magnus. "You good?"

"I—" Magnus started to formulate an airy, deflective answer, then stood from where they were sat on the floor. The tables were strewn with ingredients, though Alec had found a vacant jar somewhere and shut the eye-of-the-phoenix flowers in it. What an alchemist the world had lost in him. The burner was turned off, and the cauldron rested on it, a gossamer ribbon of steam curling from under the lid.

Magnus lifted the lid gingerly, and sighed in relief.

"Yes. I'm good." He smiled at Alec, slantwise. Something sloughed off Alec's mind, a burden breaking loose, baring the weariness folded beneath. "And you're asleep on your feet."

"M'not. On my feet," Alec protested. "It's not done, is it?"

" _You_ are all done. I can... Well, it has to cool for a few hours first." Magnus himself hovered on the brink of a steep drop. He'd channeled delicate magic for half the night without stopping. "You should sleep." He paused so he could ask the question as lightly as he should. "Do you want me to portal you home, or—"

Before he could unstick the rest of the sentence from his throat, Alec rose, twisted around the table, and in the doorway gave Magnus half a smile. "The couch is fine. Wake me when you need me."

Because neither of them had bothered to pull away and the connection still ran free, Magnus knew there was no hurt behind that smile: exhaustion, yes, and a gritty kind of contentment, but what Alec said was true. _It is fine. Right now, this is enough._

"I'll be here when you wake up," he offered.

Alec blinked slowly, considering that. "Good."

With that he went into the living room, shaking off his work boots beside the coffee table, and slid under the moment he'd dropped onto the couch. Magnus tarried at the threshold of the workroom until the telltale lull of slumber had spread into the link. In the past days, that had marked a reprieve from Alec being too deep in his mind, but now it was only soothing. Something of a relief, to realize that Alec was still comfortable enough to fall asleep here, under Magnus's roof.

He had, perhaps, feared that was no longer true.

Alec was young and mortal, and, his angelic heritage aside, needed more rest than Magnus did. As for himself, Magnus thought he'd have a catnap to cut the worst of his fatigue, and then keep an eye on the settling potion.

Contrary to his plan, he found himself reaching for the throw blanket slung on one of the armchairs. On the couch, Alec sprawled, his face planted in an embroidered cushion. Magnus allowed himself to card his fingers through the nest of Alec's hair. The waiting bed, only half slept in all week, seemed impossibly far away.

He pulled an armchair across the room with a gesture just restrained enough that it thumped softly down, the rug swallowing the noise. Alec sighed as Magnus draped the blanket over him, but did not stir.

 _You're still here_ , Magnus thought with a sting of amazement. _I did my level best to push you away, and you never went. What does it cost you to love me like that?_

Maybe, when Alec woke, he'd ask. Or maybe it was not the sort of question you could ask, when someone had chosen you to keep.

Down on the street and across the borough, the city woke to a snowy morning, stretching up out of the shadow of another night.

Magnus pressed a careful kiss to the crown of Alec's head. Then he curled back into the armchair next to the couch, closed his eyes, and slept.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Love and politics, over breakfast.
> 
>  ~~I should have tagged this "Significant Kneeling" instead of "Significant Breakfast"~~.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. For artsy pacing reasons, I decided to split this chapter in two.

There was a stranger at the door. The wards flared soundlessly at Magnus just before the knock sounded, brisk and businesslike, three times. _Nephilim_ , the wards reported as he drew himself up from the armchair with an ornery pop of his left shoulder.

A Shadowhunter with a modicum of manners, then, not one of Magnus's usual unruly visitors.

He went to answer the door before any further knocks could wake Alec. Tracks of slushy snow slipped down the windows, and the overcast day had to be near the point of noon. Magnus had slept in the clothes he'd been wearing for all of yesterday; he snapped his appearance to order with a wisp of magic and opened the door.

The Shadowhunter in the hallway was compact in figure and stern in demeanor. A demon talon or tooth had left a bold, serrated scar on her brow, and her fair hair was pulled back from it. Magnus had seen her before, arguing with Alec in the ops center, but had not noted the scar. She displayed it deliberately.

"Mr. Bane," Chloé Beauchamp said. "I'm sorry to call on you without—calling first, but I'm assuming you're privy to the whereabouts of Mr. Lightwood. Who is not answering his phone."

Her stilted courtesy almost made him laugh. Alec's phone was on silent and stowed in his coat pocket a little to the right of Magnus. "Is this an emergency, Miss—?"

"Beauchamp. No, it isn't. As I'm sure you can tell by the lack of urgent fire messages hovering about your sofa."

She looked, pointedly, at Alec's discarded boots by the coffee table. The current angle of the couch at least hid Alec himself from view. Magnus felt his jaw set. He revised his opinion of her manners.

"Then you can wait for him to get back to the Institute," he said, chilly. What possible reason did she have to come here, with her obvious disdain and discomfort for—him? For Alec being here? It didn't matter. "He's quite well. Not whisked off to any dens of diabolical vices by his warlock paramour."

She chortled. "I was told you were a piece of work, Mr. Bane."

"Then I'm in like company. Though, unless you fancy being defenestrated from this height, I suggest you get to the point."

Her gaze flickered back to him, unshaken by his barbs. She held out a folder closed with a clasp—it'd been in her left hand all the while. "I wanted to hand this to Alec in person, but... just tell him that I checked the numbers, and he's right."

 _Alec_ , was it? Magnus took the folder with a suitably imperious flick of his hand. "You can let the Institute know he's in good hands. You'll have him back in his own time."

"As always," Beauchamp said, something dry and almost approving in her tone. "Thank you for your time."

Not waiting for Magnus to reply, she swung away on her heel. He shut the door, trying to parse the whole encounter, his protective pique notwithstanding. _And he's right._ About what? Judging by Alec's soft snoring, no insight was forthcoming from that quarter.

That being so, Magnus laid a silencing charm on the couch to let Alec sleep, took a short, scalding shower in lieu of the bath his joints yearned for, and set about producing the sort of breakfast one needed after a grueling bout of spellwork. He hoped Alec wouldn't object either.

His plan suffered a setback at the state of the kitchen, which was lacking in everything but coffee and dirty dishes. Sighing, he resigned himself to fifteen minutes of furious cleaning, followed by portal hops to pick up a reasonable bounty of fruit and eggs and flaky pastries so fresh from the oven that they warmed his fingers through the paper bag.

He blew back into the loft, winded and wind-bitten, clutching the bag from the bakery. The couch creaked under movement.

"Hey." Alec sat up, rumpled and all too endearingly drowsy. "Shit. Is it afternoon already?"

"Has been for a couple of hours." Magnus threw his snow-streaked overcoat into the clothing rack and marched back into the kitchen. "If I can interest you in a mistimed breakfast, be a darling and clear the coffee table."

Since the dining table was covered in a panoply of books and papers that Magnus didn't dare dismantle yet, eating on the couch seemed the best option. The promise of food enlivened Alec, and Magnus could ignore how Alec's throat had seized at the blithely uttered _darling._

The link had not dimmed: Alec's thoughts floated in between his own, still rambling and languid with leftover dreams. If Magnus himself was hungry, Alec was evidently an inch from starving. They let the echo of last night's harmony carry them through brewing coffee and peeling pears and Magnus turning up a few lopsided waffles. They were far from his finest work, but they disappeared with commendable speed.

They sat on the couch, with a slight, meticulous distance between them, and shared the food without much conversation. The snowfall concealed them from the world beyond, veiling the city in misty whites and grays.

Finally, Alec balanced his plate on his knee and picked up the folder with the Institute insignia embossed on the cover. "Where'd this come from?"

"A very severe officer of yours paid a visit." Magnus put down his mug. He was used to the underlying derision typical to Shadowhunters and could turn it back on any of them, with ease if not especial enjoyment, but the exchange at the door kept needling him.

"For fuck's sake. She didn't give you any grief, did she?" Briefly, Magnus regretted the way Alec sharpened.

"Nothing I couldn't handle."

"I'm gonna send her to personally clear every one of those crawler infestations in Queens." Alec yanked the folder open. His near-empty plate clattered as he pushed it onto the table. "Without backup. See how she feels about showing off then."

Magnus was, in truth, somewhat touched by the ire simmering in Alec on his behalf. "I wouldn't be opposed to more civility from your soldiers in general, but I fight my own battles."

"It's not just that. I know you can protect yourself. I don't want you to have to. Not you, or any Downworlders. Not from my people." Alec rapped his fingers on the open page. "Getting that through their skulls is gonna take time, and sometimes that's really fucking frustrating."

The admission, in its wry irascibility, drew a laugh from Magnus. "That particular wheel is stuck in an immemorial rut. It can't be shifted in a few months."

"But you think it can be?" Alec's eyes lingered on the page.

 _You make me think it's possible._ If Magnus still felt unmitigably world-weary next to Alec—and Isabelle and the others—his opinion on whether the balance of the Shadow Realms could be shifted had been upturned by strides and bounds since they'd met. He decided he rather liked the trend.

"In fact, she told me to tell you something." Magnus repeated Beauchamp's parting words to Alec.

Alec soaked them in while he read the same page over again, then skimmed the rest of the printouts, graphs and tables sprinkled in between curt paragraphs. Wordiness was apparently weeded out of Shadowhunters as unbecoming. Whatever he read there, it gave him pause.

"I made some adjustments to the patrol make-ups," he said then. "Removed solo patrolling, though it's stretched us thinner. Set mandatory minimum rest periods. Chloé thought I was being too soft."

"That all sounds like good sense to me."

"Maybe, but it's not how Shadowhunters operate." There was a curious cocktail of emotions on Alec's mind: pride, resignation, and something like temerity. "You're not supposed to _look_ for it, but a death in battle is... never a bad thing. It's sad, but you can always frame it with sacrifice and necessity. Put it on a pedestal."

 _The cause is greater than the soldier—a person, a loved one._ Magnus set a hand on Alec's shoulder, wanting nothing so much as to bury himself in his arms. But physical contact was precarious between them, and why should _he_ seek comfort, when Alec was the one talking about his people's penchant for bloody demise in the name of the Angel?

Magnus sighed. Gathered himself. "Your adjustments seem to make glorious death in the line of duty less likely."

"That was the idea." Alec shunted the folder under the couch. "It's bearing out. Casualties are down. People make fewer mistakes. We've had some demon breakouts that maybe would've been noticed sooner with more patrols out, but it's starting to work."

"That's what she meant about you being right." What a novel concept that had to be. Yet, Magnus only needed to look at Alec to see a Shadowhunter fumbling his way to a better understanding of the world. If he was doing it, others could surely follow suit.

Hope was a fool's pastime, but Magnus had found himself entertaining more flagrant foolishness than this lately.

Alec, though, made a noise that suggested disbelief. "You know. Hodge taught us weapons, but Chloé was the one who took us out on the field. When I took over, she was one of those my mother pointed out to me. A senior officer I needed to get to back me."

 _She's not just an officer. She was one of your mentors._ Her personal delivery of whatever report the folder contained was clicking together, as was her mixture of arrogance and approval.

"I guess this is a step forward," Alec said. "One more push at that wheel."

Shoving back his abrupt heartache, for all the good that did when Alec was aware of it anyway, Magnus let himself study Alec. His familiar profile, the minute tension in his jaw, the soft shadows under his eyes that sometimes seemed too old for his unlined face.

"I can't imagine you got much of this from your parents," Magnus said, because apparently bringing up the elder Lightwoods was the thing to cheer up the conversation.

"No." Alec returned Magnus's look, his gaze clear. "I mostly got it from you."

"Oh." Magnus sat back, a little thunderstruck by the sheer feeling welling in Alec. It'd have been daunting even without the connection that opened to him the full depth of the sentiment.

"Not that... loving you has much to do with running the Institute as such." As Alec wavered on the word, Magnus nearly averted his eyes. "I was always taught that you should drive forward until you break. Nothing's so important you can't give it up to keep going. I used to believe that. And then when you left me, when you thought I didn't fit in with your duty—"

If Magnus could have muted the sound of his own heart, he'd have done it. Just to let Alec talk more easily, when every sentence was an effort.

"I kept thinking about what you said. About how you were afraid of losing the people you care about. How you've had to do that over and over." Alec swallowed and went on, as if he, too, knew that this hedged too close to the untried subject of how much time each of them had. Magnus didn't think he had it in him to broach that now. So he let Alec say, "Now I have you back, and I don't want to let go, Magnus. I don't want _us_ to be a thing I can sacrifice, so _I_ can't be one either."

Magnus had tried to be cautious. He'd sat apart from Alec, had avoided even casual touches, at most brushing a hand along his shoulder. But this, what Alec said and what lay underneath it, the unmixed rush of love and worry and regard, Magnus could not steel himself against.

"You upset your whole cadre of reckless minions with improved safety regulations to _spare_ me?"

"That's a word for it." Alec's mouth twitched. "The way our lives go, the stuff that we get involved in—I want us both to come home at the end of it. I want my people to do that, too. But you made me think about it first."

When Magnus leaned into him, Alec met him halfway. As embraces went, it was off-kilter, Magnus's face tucked into Alec's shoulder, his hand flat against Alec's ribs, his own chest burning with the strange, singular ache of mattering so much to someone. He blinked back an abrupt wetness in his eyes.

"That's very sweet. Also, more than a little macabre."

Alec rubbed a circle into the small of Magnus's back. His laughter hitched. "This is my first shot at romance."

With a sigh and a chuckle, Magnus conceded that. They sat, testing the nearness.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked. "About these changes you're making."

He was used to being among the first to know Alec's news. In the normal course of things, they talked all the time, in messages or in stolen moments if not night-long, winding conversations, and this seemed important enough that Alec had to have omitted it knowingly from their far-ranging list of subjects.

Hesitation clouded Alec's voice. "I—had to have something to show for it first. Not that Institute casualty rates are something you care about."

"The larger issue is, though." Whether or not he was still the High Warlock, Magnus could not pretend he wasn't tangled up the restive interplay of the nephilim and the other Shadow Realms. Alec had it right: he was going to involve himself regardless. "The safety of our city. Your Shadowhunters doing their job as they should." There was the brash, misinformed hope again.

"All of us coexisting somehow." Alec completed the thought for Magnus.

Magnus didn't want to think about politics right now, not of the hatred and distrust that anyone trying to change things would have to deal with. He'd known what Alec was—an heir of the people who'd oppressed and scorned his own for centuries. He'd still fallen in love. Had been coaxed to it by his own wayward heart, and, in no small measure, by Alec's faltering and constant progress. _Don't let it jade you_ , he wanted to say.

"I know it's just one step," Alec said. "I'm just... trying to do better."

That resonated beyond Alec's hushed words. He admitted to doubt or weakness so rarely. It was trait they shared, Magnus mused, though for different reasons.

"And I need to do the same." Magnus unfolded himself from Alec's side, the untroubled warmth of him, and bore the sense of loss that followed. Something in him—the connection, his own raw yearning, the mood that was as delicate as it was candid—had lulled itself to rest in Alec's closeness.

Alec watched Magnus as he knelt down before him and, after a second's fidgeting, laid his hands on Alec's knees. A handclasp _was_ too great a presumption.

The question on Alec's lips never made it to sound.

"You've taken a lot from me in the last few days that you never should've had to," Magnus said. "I don't... make mistakes often. Not ones of this caliber, anyway, or ones with such personal consequences." He fought the urge to clamp down on the open link and hide the stir of his own emotions. "Having you—you, of all people—in my head. It was terrifying."

"Me of all people?" Alec said, rough and quite obviously dejected.

"Oh. No, not the way you think." And Magnus knew, hurtfully keen if not exactly accurate, how Alec had heard that. "Believe me, I can think of a great many people I'd want in my head less than you. If anything, you were the most merciful possibility."

Alec nodded. His eyes were pinioned on Magnus's left hand. Magnus held it still.

"I'm too used to guarding myself. Even with the people dearest to me. I know it's hard for you to fathom, but there is still so much about me you don't know. So much that I haven't had the time to tell." That was putting it kindly, but maybe they both needed a little kindness now. "The thought of putting as much of myself in your hands as I now have was... rather harrowing."

"You thought I'd use your secrets to hurt you." It wasn't an accusation, only Alec stating a truth as he perceived it—a truth he knew well, if the bitter tint of familiarity to the idea was any indication.

"I thought my secrets might drive you away," Magnus countered. "I was afraid that they would."

"So you got angry before I could reject you?" The problematic and clement part was that the link almost let them twine their ideas together: not actually grasp them before they were spoken, but to reach the other's intent and intimation.

"It's a defensive measure. It's simpler to be righteously vexed than open yourself to somebody else's displeasure." Magnus scoffed at himself. "I can't even apologize to you without going on edifying tangents, it seems."

"I like it when you do," Alec said, striking a chink in the tension. "Go on tangents."

"Stop that." Magnus's voice dipped. "You don't have to make this easy for me."

"Okay." Alec still felt lighter to Magnus's mind. He dropped his right hand to lie on his thigh, fingertips an inch from Magnus's own.

"Not that I don't appreciate it. But I understand that you risked your own efforts to help me fix my mistake. You went around your own officers for me. Isabelle flat out lied to Lorenzo on my behalf, and you helped her cover our tracks." Magnus leaned up until Alec met his eye. "And I could say something about Lorenzo's lamentable character now, but it's not important. What is important is that every doubt I had, you proved false. So I do stand—kneel—corrected."

"What _is_ with the kneeling?" Alec looked him from that slight downward angle that would turn Magnus's heart over every time. It did so this time, too.

"It seemed appropriate?" It had.

"I'm not exactly—anybody you should do that for. If there is a person like that in the world."

His own laugh surprised Magnus, airy and sprinkled with incredulity. "Oh, Alexander. I imagine if there is such a person, then it is you."

He heard, and felt, Alec's breath catch. He took Alec's hand, half offered, and kissed the back of it with unhurried care. Alec's fingers curled, the knuckles sharpening and then smoothing again. Magnus stroked his thumb across the divot between the first and second one. A glowing spark of warmth seemed to trailed the touch.

"I am sorry," he said, up to Alec's face. "For treating you callously when I should've trusted you."

There was a pause, a heavy moment in which Alec held Magnus's eye and imbibed that. Then Alec wrapped his arms around him and pulled him close, balanced on the edge of the couch until Magnus got the hint and rose so Alec could bend his head under his chin. Magnus's hand pressed to Alec's hair. Alec breathed shallowly against his shirt. Magnus felt the solid, soothing rhythm of Alec's heart under his palm as he slid his other hand over Alec's back.

"Talk to me next time," Alec said. "Because the only sure thing is that whenever you need me, I'm here. Okay?"

Magnus held him for the span of a breath without speaking, and a little longer when Alec turned his cheek against Magnus's shoulder and let himself take comfort in the hug. Magnus felt it as an unraveling, as a slow loosening of tensions they'd both carried through the days of the past week.

"Okay." Magnus muttered the word into the silence. "I will. I promise."

By way of an answer, Alec tightened his grip.

The link rippled like a pond coming to stillness. Behind the windows, the first true snow of the winter kept falling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're not partial to feelsy make-up sex, you can take this as the ending. But there is some more to be said.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alec may or may not be playing coy. If the latter, Magnus will sit here consumed with lust for the rest of the afternoon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh look, it's the final chapter!
> 
> That Explicit rating is finally and eminently in effect now.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @[poemsfromthealley](https://poemsfromthealley.tumblr.com/) and twitter @[juneofthepen](https://twitter.com/juneofthepen) If you want to do a read-along or shout on twitter, I'm delighted to be tagged.

Moments passed. They stayed there, in the middle of the cluttered living room, holding each other for the first time in too long.

Magnus sighed into Alec's hair, only to pull back before he sneezed. Motes of blue dust glimmered in the lamplight.

"My dear," he said. "There's ground basilisk scale in your hair."

Alec made to touch his head. "Uh, is that dangerous?"

"Not unless you're planning to bathe in milk of black almonds. That creates a hallucinogenic draught."

"And you're still in walking encyclopedia mode." Alec let go of Magnus with reluctance, and then made a face. "I should probably shower, though. I'm kinda gross."

"You're adorable, is what," Magnus found himself saying. Alec coughed. Off-the-cuff compliments still flustered him more effectively than the most blistering innuendo Magnus could summon. Of course, this did nothing to make Alec less adorable.

Alec's left thumb brushed the knuckles of his right hand, at the spot Magnus had kissed earlier. He got up from the couch with a swift if slightly flaily movement. "I'm just gonna, then. I'll be back."

"Yes." Magnus made room for him, far from immune to the sudden crackle through the peace of the moment. "I should check on the fruit of our labors, anyway."

"Sounds good."

You might not have said that Alec fled toward the bedroom, but his stride had a certain evasive cast to it. Magnus could tell his heart had quickened, because his own had, too.

How deep would the sensory side of the connection go, if they let it?

The thought rather burned a hole in his mind as Magnus went to set the workroom to rights. The potion had turned the color of rose quartz and smelled of nothing—the latter being the mark of a stabilized magical brew. Magnus could sense his own magic swirling through it in a fixed, repeating pattern. He spent a moment transferring the potion into sturdy glass flasks and stoppering them.

It was not bad for a week's work. He texted to Catarina the news of their success, inviting her over to see the results. To both their regret, she hadn't been there for the process, but he was eager for her opinion all the same. There was something steadying to the prospect of debating this achievement with her, a touch of normalcy. He could use that.

 _Tomorrow evening?_ came her reply. _In case you want to catch up with Alec first._

Magnus's throat did _not_ go hot at that. She hadn't even teased him. The shower stopped running in the bathroom, and Magnus flinched as Alec apparently knocked his elbow on something.

He sent Cat a time suggestion for tomorrow and replaced the last jars of ingredients on the shelves by hand, so as not to be startled in mid-spell by Alec's abrupt lack of coordination. A scant distance had returned to the link, a subtle screen between them. Magnus went on to check the workroom wards and not think about Alec, clean and warm and damp from the shower, his towel too low on his hips as was his wont. He noted down a couple of the wards for later adjustment, while Alec shuffled around in the walk-in closet, looking for clothes.

"You're being ridiculous," Magnus told himself, as if saying it out loud would be more likely to restore his good sense. They'd just reconciled. Of course he was feeling Alec's absence, and the lightness of relief did not help. He cleared away the breakfast dishes with a defiant flair of magic, and then made tea. It occupied his hands.

In principle, he'd never been averse to bringing various and sundry magic into the bedroom. This was different from a potion to fuel endurance or a charm to inflame the senses. _Alec_ was different from any adventuresome late-night acquaintance Magnus might once have wooed with decadent promises.

"Hey." Alec poked his head into the kitchen. He was dressed, with annoying decency, in a tee-shirt and sweatpants. At least he didn't look like he was about to escape back to the Institute posthaste.

"Tea?" Magnus asked, because _I want to climb you like a tree_ was not an eloquent segue into... whatever they planned to do next.

"Sure. How's the potion?"

"Perfect." Magnus piled Alec's hands with mugs. "I'll have to do some final analyses, but I stored it for now. A full night's sleep in an actual bed is probably wise before I test it on any live subjects. If you can tolerate the current state of affairs a little longer."

"I'm good," Alec said, a trifle breathy.

He folded himself to sit on the floor, while Magnus took the couch and tried to deduce the import of that seating choice. Alec seemed calm, if a touch spaced out the way you got without enough sleep, but he was also capable of sealing himself off from the link when he wanted to. He was doing it to a small degree, enough to reduce but not halt the flow of input between them.

"You really just made up a new kind of magic in a few days, hm?" Alec blew on his tea, speculative.

"Specifically, I recreated one that'd fallen out of use."

Alec glanced up at Magnus with undisguised pride. "That's still incredible. You are."

"Let's remember there was some undesirable fallout first." Magnus could almost pretend Alec's compliment did not ignite a swooping, searing glow in him. "But we're about to set things right. I couldn't have done this without you."

As Alec nodded, his cheeks looked warm. "I got Izzy to cover for me today. I owe her about six Saturdays off and a year of ice cream, but it's fine."

"She seems the type to come collecting, too."

"She's going to." Alec was drawing a fingertip over his knuckles again, as if mesmerized by the patch of skin, thin over the juts of the joints.

"I assume you have something to do, then, if you're ignoring the dulcet tones of duty calling for you." Magnus sipped the tea. The aroma of lemon and sandalwood wafting from it did little to calm him.

"I don't know." Alec let his lower lip slide free from his teeth, leaving it red. "There's always you."

"Oh, for—" Magnus found himself bereft of any facile retort. He'd walked squarely into that, like a callow youth that he hadn't been in four hundred years, and Alec's amusement glimmered smug and golden through the connection. "I'll never live that down, shall I?"

"It depends," said Alec, as if that'd been a serious question. "Are you gonna stop being horny for long enough that I can get through today without being compromised? And by 'compromised' I mean I nearly jerked off in the shower because you were pretty bothered about _something_ over in the workroom."

Magnus let himself slide dramatically to the floor. Trust Alec to cut to the heart of the matter. "Alexander—" He tried to reorient himself. Remind himself that caution might be the better part of throwing himself in Alec's arms and ravishing him.

"Magnus," Alec said, in fair imitation of Magnus's usual indulgent tone, and Magnus groaned through his teeth.

"It isn't quite so simple. Yes, I missed you. Yes, I want you. Of course. That isn't remotely in question. But we don't know exactly how the link will behave if we..." _Get intimate? Have sex?_ In an uncharacteristic fit of difficulty, he contented himself with an evocative gesture. "Consider how you reacted the first time I touched you."

"That was different." Alec sounded convinced of that. "I wasn't sure what you wanted, so I was on guard. You're being a lot clearer now."

"Am I?" Was the situation as straightforward as Alec made it out to be? Magnus wanted to trust that it was.

"Pretty much. A lot clearer and a lot less angry."

"I suppose I should find that encouraging." Magnus did, in fact. He'd take Alec being scorchingly frank over Alec shying away from him any day.

Still, Alec's next question choked him a little. "I mean, you're not curious? About what it'd be like?"

 _Oh, have mercy_ , Magnus thought. Damn Alec and his utter lack of artifice. Damn him in the low light of the living room that made him soft, turning him from a trained soldier into just a young man, sloe-eyed and sweet-limbed.

He'd always been able to set Magnus at ease. To make matters worse, now he knew it. It bled from Magnus into the link and he couldn't will himself to halt it, to raise again the barriers that they'd spent the night unbuilding.

"I'd lie if I didn't admit to some theoretical fascination." Magnus shifted so he faced Alec partway.

Alec's mouth made a line, but its corner crooked.

"I can feel you laughing at me."

"I'm not." Alec settled on his back, pillowing his head on a wrist, the line of his body from hip to throat open and unguarded. _I hate you,_  Magnus added inwardly, with the impotent grit of a man about to lay down his arms. "I'm just way more comfortable with this than you. So if you want, I can go, and we can wait this out."

 _Of course you are. You've been navigating all this while I'm just fumbling about._ Magnus reeled the notion in. Alec inhaled, drawing his ribs into relief under his shirt, and Magnus felt how real his relaxation was. Not complete, but genuine.

He rested a hand on Alec's chest, and, the permission in the half-lidded look Alec gave him, kissed him.

It was like every other time he'd kissed Alec. It was like none of them. It shivered through him in a delirious pulse, his own want and doubt melding into Alec's careless welcome of him.

It was so much worse to be skin to skin. Desire kicked in his gut and he didn't know if he was spurring Alec on or responding to him. They kept the pace lazy, but the contact was a burning fuse, spitting sparks. Alec's fingers grazed the nape of his neck, and Magnus moaned at the stroke like Alec had done something far more intense. His cock jerked. Gasping, Alec broke away.

" _God_." His eyes were huge and hazed, and lust parched Magnus's throat. The feeling was both Alec's and his own. The line blurred. Alec in his vicinity was shimmering sensation, a focal point pulling him in.

Alec under him was a blaze, a beacon, like a flame of his own magic, burning without consuming.

"I had to test it in practice, no?" Magnus said, rough.

"Sure. Do that again and my heart might stop."

Of their own accord, Magnus's fingers spread over Alec's chest. "I'd keep it beating."

This time Alec's laugh was warm and uninhibited. Magnus felt it in his own chest. "You're never allowed to call _me_ a sap again."

He did that a good deal, didn't he? Pointed out Alec's quirks, whether to rib him or praise him. As much as Magnus made light of his habit of considering himself unimportant, Alec had come such a way in the time they'd known each other. He'd faced his feelings and claimed them as his own. He'd refused the mask of the stoic soldier the Clave had cast for him, and declared that under his leadership, the New York Institute would commit to more that grudging obligation.

When Alec touched his neck, Magnus realized he'd drifted. "You're... thinking about me. I think. I hope, anyway. They seem like good thoughts."

Soon this would be over. The new potion would reverse the effect, and they'd return to normal.

"How much can you tell?"

"That you're kinda—" Alec pondered. "Fond. A little worried or wistful. Mostly happy, though. I like that."

"I should've known you'd give me an exhaustive report."

"You're also pretty turned on. Again. Didn't seem diplomatic to start with that." However plainly Alec said that, it seared in his stomach. Magnus laid a hand on the taut muscles of Alec's abdomen before he even registered the gesture. " _That_ isn't so diplomatic either."

Magnus stroked Alec's hipbone through his sweatpants. If he moved his hand a mere couple of inches, he could palm the firming curve of Alec's cock. The idea alone shortened his breath. It'd been one kiss. One near-chaste touch to his neck had made his head swim.

"If we do this, I demand a bed. Preferably our own."

Alec took Magnus's offered hand and let Magnus help him onto his feet. Hand to hand, Alec's swift heartbeat thrummed into him, both bracing and exhilarating. Magnus thought of the carnal pleasures he'd thrown himself into over the years, often for little more than a passing fancy, born of novelty or boredom. A thousand encounters, most of which faded in the morning, even though some had flowed into repeats or even liaisons of some longevity.

He didn't know what to expect here.

That was novelty of a kind.

Alec pressed his mouth under his ear, moving down to Magnus's throat. Each imprint burned. Magnus dug his fingers into Alec's sides, pushed him back to divest him of his shirt. Shedding clothing as they went, they moved in a stuttering orbit around each other: into a column as Alec made short work of Magnus's pants, then nearly into a painting as Magnus missed a step, only to be caught by Alec's arm around his waist.

The collision of their bodies spread like a sunburst. He crushed a moan against Alec's mouth, and Alec opened to him. The kiss washed away any awareness of where they were, what was happening beyond Alec's arms and the feel of his body on Magnus's own.

They reached the bed. This dawned on Magnus as he knocked his shin into it. Jerking the covers aside with a sweep of his hand, he overshot his target so most of the bedding slid to the floor in an avalanche of linen and goose-down. Alec chuckled. "You're taking this seriously."

Magnus linked his arms around Alec's waist and steadied himself on him. "You deserve it."

This time he had the chance to appreciate how that resounded in Alec, stirring his desire and his apprehension. Alec's sides rose and fell with a shaky breath. "I didn't really... plan this in detail."

"You don't trust our capacity for improvisation?"

"Hmm." Alec's fingers moved between the nape of Magnus's neck and the top of his spine in a dithering figure eight. It was supremely distracting. "Would you trust mine?"

"If we ignore your positively villainous tries to make me lose all cognitive ability—" Magnus stole a kiss "—then yes. I do."

"Good," said Alec, and spun Magnus off his feet and onto the bed.

Alec's lips were on his before he caught his breath again. Magnus grasped at him, responding with rapt, clumsy ferocity, teetering under Alec's kisses, Alec's hands under his thighs, lifting his knees, Alec's cock grinding against his hip. Magnus held himself down by stint of will so as not to rut into the motion and make a hard, messy climax of all this.

Of course, now he'd pictured it, and Alec shivered above him. "Oh, shit."

Magnus set a hand on Alec's face. His thumb drew soothing strokes over his jaw. "Too much?"

"No. You never are."

"Flatterer."

"You can literally tell that's true."

"I wonder sometimes how you can think that." Magnus bent a knee so his shin aligned with Alec's thigh, putting space between their bodies. They were both suddenly watchful of where they touched, which was ludicrous given that they were naked in the bed where they'd made love a hundred times before.

Never like this.

"Why?" Alec frowned, a shadow crossing his face.

"I've been a first for you in a fair few things," Magnus said, "and not always an easy one."

"Because clearly I thought falling headfirst for a warlock was gonna _ease_ me into the whole dating thing."

Swallowing, Magnus pressed his face into Alec's hair. His fingers threaded into the damp, tousled mass of it. "What am I going to do with you, Alexander?"

Gradual amazement, like a fist coaxed to uncurl, touched him as Alec relaxed under his hands. Want sparked languidly and mellowed into a hazier feeling as they wound themselves together again.

"Right now," Alec said, stroking Magnus's back, "pretty much anything you want."

With a tender hand, Magnus traced Alec's collarbone to his shoulder, then a sweep across his chest and circles over his left nipple. Pinching it firmly between his fingers, Magnus licked it until it peaked taut and dark and Alec's breaths trembled under his lips.

"The problem," he said, "is the decision." To make his point, he kissed Alec's other nipple, slow, sucking kisses that dripped thick arousal through both their veins. "I could give you my mouth. I could slick your fingers and get them deep in me, ride your hand like that. Tie you up and make you watch as I pleasure myself, and you'd feel it like I was touching you."

" _Magnus_." Alec bucked into him in a burst of movement, and smothered any further prospects with kisses to his jaw and cheek. "How—mmh—how about you pick a thing before I come at you _thinking_ about fucking me."

Magnus knew he talked a splendid game, but this time, every wild fancy was heightened by the link. "When it's you, 'anything I want' is a daunting proposition."

Alec drew back. "Should I take point?"

"If you wish." Magnus leaned in for one more kiss. Alec slipped a testing finger over his lip, onto his tongue, only as deep as Magnus would take it. A careful, charged gesture. Magnus sucked the finger in to the knuckle and nipped at the base with his teeth.

"Yeah," Alec murmured, "that's good." He guided Magnus's arms up over his head, pulled a pillow from the heap at the head of the bed and tucked it under his hips. Magnus allowed himself to be laid out, to only respond to Alec's touch, to only feel the snap and surge of trammeled urgency between them.

Being the object of Alec's desire, having that honed discipline turned to an unsparing effort to please him, was heady in any circumstances. Like this, with that desire pouring into his own until they were one and the same, it verged on overwhelming.

"Hey."

Magnus blinked his eyes open. Alec's face above him took away what thought he had left. Not because he was beautiful, though he was, eyes hooded and mouth dark.

This would be over soon. They'd go back to being as they were supposed to be. But long after, Magnus would think back to the sight of Alec looking at him like he was a word fallen from the mouth of a god, and come undone at the memory alone.

"Hey," he said, and rose up to kiss Alec's bruised, beautiful mouth.

Anticipation cinched in Alec as he drew a long caress down Magnus's side and hip and leg. His thumb trailed the inside of Magnus's thigh down to his ass, teasing and pressing at his hole. Not in, but enough to paint the idea in such potency that Magnus twisted in place.

Alec held the kiss, halting, for a few more circles of his thumb on the rim. Then he opened Magnus's legs, parted him, revealed him, and licked into him shallow and slow.

"Alexander," he said, "I can _feel_ you—" before words crumpled under Alec's fingers pinning him open, Alec's tongue on him, Alec's every thought of nothing but him.

Alec wanted this—wanted him—so much. Wanted to make him feel and forget and be fulfilled. The thought flowed through Magnus like water, soaking and consuming him.

Alec made his way up to the base of his cock, his tongue working slickly into the skin, and down again. Magnus arched like a bent bow as Alec kissed his rim, both reverent and obscene. It was a gesture of worship, a wicked, tender supplication. Magnus's legs shook as if his knees were about to buckle.

"Oh, yes. Alec. _Alec_."

His breaths coming ragged, Alec pushed the tip of his tongue inside Magnus a lick at a time, in layers and layers of incredible friction. Magnus's toes curled into the sheet, into the springy give of the mattress. He buried his fingers in Alec's hair, and something like living light welled in the connection. It crackled through his nerves as Alec shuddered above him.

"Don't let go," Alec said, thickly. Magnus didn't know if it was a plea or an order, but he felt the fettered need behind it.

"I won't." He opened his hand, stroked Alec's hair, gripped it again.

With a sigh that courted relief, Alec bent his head down. He sucked stinging kisses on the insides of Magnus's thighs while his slickened finger played at Magnus's hole, only to be replaced by the flat of his tongue. He alternated so, maddening and uneven, between deep licks and stretching swirls of his thumb. Magnus's awareness grew hazy and narrow. Tension wound through his legs, his stomach, his hand that still held Alec's head in place.

Alec had wanted that: his desire was sharp and sweet. His body burned with it under his headstrong resolve to please Magnus, and Magnus threw his head back and clutched the sheet in his fist as Alec made love to him.

That did seem the phrase for the messy, unabashed rhythm of Alec's tongue, sweeping wetly over Magnus's hole, sliding inside him again. Magnus's cock twitched, and Alec moaned as the movement resounded in him. The promise of a climax twisted between them. If one went, the other would follow. And Alec wanted it to be him, Magnus knew, even as Alec did his utmost to rob him of his last conscious thought.

"Alec," he rasped. Only Alec's grip held his hips to the bed. "Ah, ah, stop. I'm going to—"

"Want you to, babe. Want you to come for me."

"Yes." Magnus broke above the sheer sensation. "Come, come up here."

Half-dreamy, Alec followed Magnus's tug, his mouth and jaw smeared with spit and sweat. Magnus swiped an unceremonious fistful of sheet over his face.

"Too into this for a cleanup spell?" Alec grinned. "Guess I'm flattered."

Magnus found the focus to roll his eyes. "You're a mess, sweetheart."

"Like you had nothing to do with it."

Magnus had missed this, too: how easily their lovemaking turned into laughter, the sort of breathless banter that was maybe only funny in bed, with your senses full of each other, all walls down.

"I most certainly had something to do with it." He caught Alec's gaze and the tint of a question in it. "I can feel how close you are."

"Then why'd you stop me? I thought..."

They were so enmeshed with one another that their pleasure merged, and still some things needed to be said.

"I want you in me. I want to feel it when you come, not just through the link. With you in my arms."

"Oh," Alec said, like he'd had the air knocked out of his lungs.

He almost said something more, then threw himself across the bed to dig through a drawer of the nightstand.

Magnus would not withstand Alec's penchant for lengthy, patient fingering right now. He nudged two fingers inside himself and summoned a pulse of magic, biting back a hiss at the sensation. It wasn't his favorite way of preparing, but it had its uses.

An added benefit was admittedly the look on Alec's face as he found Magnus already slick and yielding. "Did you—? Of course you did." He stroked his own lubed fingertip over Magnus's rim. "Too worked up to use magic, my ass."

"It's not—" Magnus dragged in a breath so as not to dissolve under the lust swelling through Alec's amusement. "It's not your ass that should be your concern. Rather, your cock. In me."

"Yeah." Alec worked his fist over his own shaft, too leisurely for Magnus's liking.

"Alexander Lightwood, if you dawdle another second, I'll find the magic to pin you to this bed and ride you until you forget your own name."

"That's—that's your idea of a threat?" Alec did shift closer, his hands to the bed on either side of Magnus. His cock curved hot to Magnus's palm.

"Or persuasion. Whichever works."

The sound that the first stroke wrung from Alec was, all told, worth the delay. Magnus permitted himself this reckless, greedy moment, pulling Alec inside of him, solid and breathtaking. Did he know how Magnus adored him, beyond all sense, beyond all caution?

Alec put his head against Magnus's shoulder and moved in a deep, indulgent glide, and they both lost what rhythm they'd built, waylaid by the brilliant glut of feeling. Alec swore, then fell laughing onto Magnus's chest.

_He knows. Of course he knows._

"All right," Magnus said, "maybe I was a touch ambitious about that."

"Just a bit."

Magnus kissed Alec's temple, savoring the way Alec pressed into him, shaking with the last of his laughter, heedlessly fond even through the brimming desire.

They went back to it more gently. Magnus realized the tremor in his muscles was more than an echo of the dragged-out wait. Some of it was Alec, bracing himself up, pacing his thrusts in a patient rolling tempo that had them clinging to one another with white-knuckled force. Magnus sank into the ache and the pleasure and the way they fused in his senses.

Alec's cock slid across his prostate, again and again. The sensation built until Magnus went tight around the blunt, silken pressure. "Oh, oh, _please—_ "

"Please what?" Alec's voice was hoarse with strain.

"Just don't—don't stop. That's good. That's amazing." He was babbling. His legs hooked clumsily around Alec.

"I won't. I won't, I've got you." When Magnus arched up against Alec's thrusts, Alec held him fast and down. Just where he wanted him.

The knowledge was heady, mesmeric. The shiver in his muscles was a warning and a promise. He fumbled for Alec, for his flushed face, bare with feeling, and Alec bent into his hand, coming to rest so he was buried to the root in Magnus.

"I can't," Magnus gasped. "Love, I can't."

Alec rolled his hips. Magnus cried out. So it went, like every time, like none of them.

They collapsed together, slipping limbs and melding motions, in the clutch of shared need. Alec's movements turned rough and deep and stuttering. It might've been Alec who tilted over the edge first. Impossible to say, in the end.

Magnus held him with aching arms as pleasure burst through his nerves and so into Magnus, too, in a shattering swell that seemed to momentarily wipe out the boundaries of their bodies. Their hearts raced to one feverish beat, their breaths rasped in ragged harmony. Magnus came against Alec's fingers, and his own palm throbbed with the sticky glides of his cock into Alec's hand.

For a moment he couldn't tell where exactly he ended, or Alec began. He didn't care. Only this mattered: Alec trying to speak and coming up with a moan. Alec spending himself in him with a few final thrusts, hot and frantic. Their limbs wound into each other. Alec's weight on him, there at last. Alec, Alec, Alec.

Shivering with the last long tremors of their peak, they pulled apart, fingers from fingers, skin from skin.

Magnus recalled himself enough to scrub the worst mess away from both them and the bed with a somewhat punchy wave of magic. It left the sheets spattered with teal.

"Am I supposed to read into the color choice?" Alec poked at one of the ink-spill stains.

"No." Magnus peered at him.

Alec looked back at Magnus, his eyelids heavy, his cheeks mottled with red. Magnus wanted to kiss him and never come up again from the warmth of his mouth.

Half-consciously, catching the thought, Alec turned his head. Magnus pressed his face against Alec's throat instead. His grip tightened around Alec's bicep.

"I love you," he said, close and low, where Alec could hear but not see him. "More than I know what to do with."

"I know," Alec said. "Me too."

His hand caressed Magnus's sweat-matted hair with hushing patience. Magnus took a long time relaxing into him.

* * *

Magnus dozed for a while, a slow hour or two. The exertion lay thick against his bones when he came awake again. The sheets had faded back to their usual cream hue. The snowfall had thinned but not stopped, the lights of the darkening city blurred into opalescent haloes by it.

Alec was splayed a-slant across the bed, his long limbs mostly everywhere Magnus was not. He'd fished the blankets from the floor and covered Magnus with them, but for himself he was naked and a touch restless, one arm curving through a stretch toward the ceiling.

"Sleep well? There's water to your right."

Nodding his appreciation, Magnus drained the glass on the nightstand, though the water had gone a little tepid. "And you?"

"I slept some." Alec pivoted his raised wrist through its range of movement. "Don't ask what time it is."

"I think we can worry about that tomorrow." If there was any justice in the world, they had earned a few more hours of hiding away. Even as sleep dwindled from him, Magnus was left with a hum in his muscles, a pleasant sense of animation. "Come here?"

The minute hitch in Alec's breath told him that there was, maybe, a reason why Alec was not yet there. Magnus was a more mobile sleeper than Alec, which sometimes scattered them across the bed in the night, but they tended to close the distance on any morning that let them laze before rising.

Magnus pushed off the covers. "What is it?"

"Nothing." Alec rolled over onto his side.

"You forget you can't really obfuscate me right now," Magnus said, gently, and sidled up so he was facing Alec. "Something's bothering you."

They'd just had the most marvelous round of sex in Magnus's memory. He wasn't foolish enough to think that meant everything was clear between them.

"No, I'm. I was thinking." Magnus waited as Alec rifled through prospective openings. "It's stupid. Maybe."

It was a kind of consolation that Alec had a more contemplative than anxious air, like he simply had a problem in his teeth and was trying to worry it into submission.

"Between you and me, if it bothers you, there's no such thing as stupid." Magnus ventured out a hand, and Alec clasped it.

"I'll give you space if you want it," Alec said, in a rush. "I get that. Sometimes I can't see people for a night. It's not the same for you, but I get the principle."

Magnus was rather sure Alec was more inclined to therapeutic solitude than he himself; he relaxed better in company, when it was company he'd chosen. He could also see where Alec's concern stemmed.

"I went a long time without really sharing my space. Sometimes I forget how to adjust to that. To having you here." Squeezing Alec's hand, Magnus remembered that they had originally quarreled over this very point. It seemed trivial now, buried under the small mountain of everything that had happened since. "I can't expect to invite you in and then not have you take your place here."

"I guess not." Alec uncurled Magnus's fingers, stroking his own across Magnus's palm. The soft, dawdling touch woke a whispering awareness along his nerves. "I just—I need you to tell me when I fuck up. You've been doing this a lot longer than I have."

" 'This' being—?"

"Relationships?"

Magnus sighed long and slow, shaded with self-irony. "I can hardly claim any great expertise in them anymore. I think it's you that's teaching _me_ how to be in one again."

Something at once pleased and abashed shot through Alec at that. His voice turned as whimsical as it ever would. "Then you should probably know, in the interest of how to be with me, that I take instruction well."

Magnus felt a laugh jolt his chest, tried to pin it down, and failed utterly. "You do indeed. A little too well at times. You don't always need to be the one putting in the effort."

Alec kept working circles into the hollow of Magnus's palm, watching the movement of his own thumb. "It's what I know. It's easier."

Sometimes Magnus also forgot, with his own affinity for delicate gestures and convoluted intimations, that while Alec was well capable of grasping complexity, he arranged his life along lines that did not always bend. To love someone was to serve them, to put their wellbeing above his own.

"All right," Magnus said, "here's what I want you to do: stop me if I presume."

"Right." Alec's breath tattered, and Magnus went a little light-headed with wanting him. They'd cracked the keenest point of the built-up tension. What stirred now was more gradual, a lush, dazing sort of desire.

"Down," he said then, testing, and set his left hand wide on Alec's stomach.

It was only contact, no pressure, but Alec fell onto his back in the bunched sheets, his eyes fluttering shut. Not kissing his parted mouth seemed the hardest thing Magnus had ever done.

Instead he laid a kiss on the side of Alec's throat, bare and enticing, biting down just enough for Alec to gasp. Then a softer one under his ear; a wet, flickering one to the point where jaw met neck. Alec squirmed and dragged his toes against the mattress. Magnus pressed his palm into the clenched muscles of his stomach, and he stilled.

He went on so, for long weightless minutes: kisses to Alec's clavicle, the bend of his elbow, the underside of his wrist. Every tender spot that he could remember, or found when a touch startled a ragged sound out of Alec. Alec's cock filled slowly, curving up against his stomach. When Magnus's lips lingered against Alec's palm, Alec slid a fingertip along his mouth, but said nothing, asked nothing. Only waited for Magnus to work out his whim.

"I would—" Magnus nipped at Alec's finger, a tiny sting, a spark of want "—rather like to fuck you."

He'd barely said that when Alec, his lassitude gone, pulled him up and claimed the kiss Magnus had left undone. It was hasty, slanted, more than a little sloppy; it made him sway.

"Yeah," Alec said, the word alone a frisson of fire on Magnus's skin. "From behind. Deep in me."

"Are you sure?"

"I told you. You're never too much."

Just for the way that made him ache, Magnus stroked Alec's cock, from the root to the slickness at the tip, then drew his fingers through the sweat and spend on Alec's skin. When he brought them to his mouth, Alec gave a tremulous sound.

"Fuck, I can taste you tasting me. That's a little twisted."

"Alec. Darling. You had your tongue in my ass this afternoon, and _this_ is the thing that gets to you?" Magnus hid his grin against Alec's spine as Alec rolled over under him, pliably responsive, pushing into Magnus's palm on his ass.

"Maybe it is."

"Hush." Magnus's other hand tracked the long smooth line of a muscle across Alec's back. "Easy now, for me."

"Always am," Alec said. Magnus had to kiss the back of his neck then. He went still under the soft knead of Magnus's fingers.

Everything had a dreamlike intensity to it. Each touch pulled noises from Alec as Magnus worked his way down the dip of his back and the scant curve of his ass.

Forearmed with the memory of how sharp the sensation could get, when each of them fed the sensory loop between them, Magnus took his time. He teased his fingers along Alec's cock, smearing the precome over the tender head. The lube Alec had tossed onto the bed warmed in his palm while he leaned to lick a path up Alec's spine, slow and undulating, interrupted by his own gasps that echoed Alec's reedy breaths.

By the time that Magnus stretched him open with two deft, circling fingers, Alec was moaning aloud. It took remarkable effort to make him noisy in the first place: Magnus had grown used to interpreting him by sighs and the rare bit of swearing. Now, though, he bit his knuckles to muffle himself.

"There's no need to be quiet," Magnus murmured into his ear. "I like hearing you."

Alec sank onto his elbows onto the bed, as Magnus's words or his voice spread a curl of shining heat in his stomach.

"Or not," Magnus went on, smoothly, and gripped Alec's hip. "As you wish." His cock nestled into the cleft of Alec's ass, and for a blinding heartbeat the urge to drive himself heedlessly into Alec was a roar in his ears.

"Oh fuck," Alec said, at last. "God, Magnus, now. Like that. Please."

Magnus obliged him, as closely as he could: a single deep stroke, until their hips fit together and Magnus had forced his way to some coherence through the lust that speared through him. Alec curved into him, tight and hot around his cock, a pleasured groan wrested from his throat.

His desire beat in Magnus, too, the delirious sense of being filled and fucked and taken. Though his whims in this matter changed with the wind, Magnus knew it well, and having it ripple back into him from Alec was a stunning feeling.

He moved so it would not overtake him.

Under him, Alec melted into a stammering litany of _oh, oh, oh,_ his hips shifting into Magnus's motions, seeking to prolong each measured push and pull. Sweat broke along his back and ran down the back of his neck.

"Look at you," Magnus said, half to himself. "My brave Alexander."

Alec's hand found Magnus's on his shoulder, their pace slipping as Alec seized it. "Yours."

Magnus's heart tripped. He slotted their fingers together, though it switched his point of leverage, leaning him deeper over Alec, and kissed a damp, lingering trail up to Alec's ear, across the salt on his skin. "Yours," he repeated, and then thrust painstakingly inside Alec. "For as long as you'll have me."

It seemed a coward's choice to say it now, with Alec naked and needy beneath him, when Magnus could do anything to him and Alec would allow it.

He'd thought to tease. Alec would rise to the challenge, lovely and stubborn, every time, and Magnus relished setting his will to the task of dragging out both their pleasure.

Now, Alec's hand clamped down on Magnus's own, as Alec began to slip from the raw edge of their shared urgency. There was a searing, tender thought that breached to the surface and sank again.

Sighing, Magnus dropped his head against Alec's strong, sweat-damp back, and rolled his hips in pliant strokes, never withdrawing. Alec clenched around him. Relief and need coiled through him from the wide-open connection.

There would be other times. This one might just be for sweetness.

Alec gave up an unsteady stream of words, _Magnus_ and _love_ and _please_ mingling together in his voice and his head, and Magnus laid biting kisses across the lines of the runes on his back to hold himself together.

Then, "Oh, oh, Magnus—" The pleasure cinched in Alec like a pulled knot. "Magnus, I'm gonna come."

Magnus slid into him, hard, and between his cock and his hand, Alec came apart. He grit out a last repeat of Magnus's name before burying his head and his cries in a pillow.

"There—" Magnus kept moving, resolved, trembling with the twinned feeling of his cock sinking into Alec. "There, just so, that's lovely. You're a wonder."

Alec's heady, wrenching climax almost dragged Magnus under along with him. Magnus fucked him through it, with short grinding thrusts as Alec writhed and strove to a messy completion.

Finally Alec collapsed into the sheets like a wave onto shore, and lay panting with his face still hidden by the pillow. "Mmh. Oh. That was—I think you broke me a little."

"I think you're a ridiculous, marvelous man who can too rarely make anything easy for himself." Magnus drew back as gently as he could. Alec bit back a noise, too tender after his orgasm. Stroking his hip, slow and calming, Magnus went on, "Thank you for letting me do that for you."

"Yeah." Turning onto his back, Alec clasped the side of Magnus's neck. Affection mixed into something more complex on his face. Magnus let him muse on it and got his own breathing back under control.

Alec nudged him in between his raised knees. Magnus tried not to moan as his cock nestled against Alec's stomach. Alec was warm and slack against him, his passion wrung from him to the last pleasurable drop. A part of Magnus would've been content to submerge into that delicious exhaustion, even with the unspent need fizzing under his skin.

_I love you like this. When you let yourself be quiet._

Before Magnus could gather his thoughts any further, Alec ran a palm down his chest and parted their entanglement.

"Now you." Alec wound his hand around Magnus's cock, then fit Magnus's fingers over his own. "Pace me. Like this."

It shouldn't have been as absurdly hot as it was to have Alec offer his own hand for Magnus to guide. His eyes were half-lidded, drinking in the surprise that Magnus knew showed on his face.

Alec kissed him deeply and lazily, like they were only getting started. The kiss tasted of sleep and sunlight in Alec's mind; he pulled Magnus more firmly into it with a hand at the back of his head. His other hand, clever and callused, was laced with Magnus's own around his aching cock. Alec's thumb teased the seam of the head and shaft so that light flared in Magnus's vision.

Recalling Alec's words, Magnus tugged at his hand and curled his fingers more tightly, steering him to the rhythm he wanted. Alec kissed his mouth again, then his face as Magnus lost the focus to hold the kiss.

It struck Magnus in a distant way that Alec hardly needed the guidance of his faltering hand. Every twitch of his muscles, every barely spoken plea already bared his desire to Alec, and the link did the rest, forming an undammed conduit between them.

A white shimmer lapped at the hem of his vision. Magnus let his head fall forward and his tattering control unravel, spilling carelessly into Alec's arms.

With a sure grip, Alec caught him and held him fast as he gave himself up to the pleasure.

* * *

The next time Magnus woke, it was to a dim, creeping dawn. Alec's sleeping weight was draped over him, his head nuzzled into Magnus's shoulder. It was somewhat hampering the circulation in his arm.

When he tried to extricate himself, as gently as he could, Alec mumbled and came awake with a start. Magnus took the opportunity to brush his hair back from his face.

"Good morning."

"Mmh," Alec said. "Is it? Actually morning this time?"

"I believe so." Magnus's body reminded him that he was also thoroughly, triumphantly sore, and though Alec's movement had liberated his arm, he didn't particularly feel like rising to check the time. He flexed his fist to shoo off the pins and needles.

"Looks like it." Alec kissed the juncture of Magnus's neck and shoulder, idle and fond, like he hadn't in a week. Magnus never wanted to miss it for that long again. "How are you?"

Magnus paused. "Can't you tell?"

Alec shook his head, as the realization passed between them the old-fashioned way, and then let himself slump back into Magnus's side. "Please don't tell me it's gone because we fucked. Just. Don't."

"For the sake of scholarly integrity, I'd have to repeat the experiment for that." Magnus nearly got through the sentence before laughter undid his solemn tone. Alec guffawed with no great dignity.

"I'm _not_ volunteering as a test subject. Though—" Alec's gaze wandered to the ceiling. "You don't think ordinary sex is gonna be a little boring after yesterday?"

"With you?" Magnus could not resist drawling, before going on, more soft and sober, "No. I can't imagine that."

Huffing affectionately, Alec scooted closer. "Yeah, with me, you asshole. Does this mean you have to get up and go investigate the mystery of how we're not mind-linked anymore, or can we sleep a bit more?"

Eventually, Magnus would. Regardless of what had dissolved the charm between them—chance, or the completion of its objective—he still had the rest of the spells to break. But Alec was warm next to him, and the hour was mildly criminal to be awake at.

"Well," he said, "I could be persuaded. One should hope it's going to be an ordinary Thursday."

 

_end_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are much appreciated! Thank you all for coming along for the ride! ♥


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